AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 45

Dancing Lessons

Dirty Dancing. Written by . Starring and . Showing at Hoyts nationally. Reviewed by Lyndell Fairleigh.

Dirty Dancing is not as salacious as its title suggests and is surprisingly free of moralising on lonely, sensitive, even needy of incidental to the plot nor simply sexuality for a movie targetted affection. A fiction usually all the another form of storytelling (though primarily at an adolescent audience. better for being kept so. it is that, too): it is an act of It's the story of a young woman's Baby is tempted to keep Johnny as subversion and, following in Baby's awakening: not simply to her own her own private fantasy- her father footsteps (metaphorically), Johnny sexuality but also to the politics of has already made it plain that he determines not to bow down to the class. believes any association between the management and their complacent It's 1963 and "Baby" is on her way, two would be unacceptable - but routine. He and his with parents and older sister, to an eventually faces the challenge of eventually lead the rest of the resort a exclusive Jewish summer camp admitting to the liaison. She thereby merry dance (literally) and disrupt resort. Daddy's a doctor and the allows Johnny an independence and the social fabric in the process. These family well-heeled. They are the humanity that the women he has two previously isolated groups particular friends of the camp's played gigolo to have not. This is mingle on the dance floor and, for as manager and, consequently, are Baby's story, nonetheless, and long as the music lasts, dance to the accorded preferential treatment. Johnny stays true to her image of same drum. Baby has convictions, nonetheless: him. When Johnny leaps from the stage she aspires to join the Peace Corps Unlike the aristocratic Rochester, and invites the audience to join him, and change the world. Buttressed by Johnny has stepped off the streets he is refusing to contain his her family's wealth, she is naively and is vulnerable. (He is more like his subversive energy and to play the optimistic about achieving those literary brother, Heathcliff, but fiction they have devised for him: the changes. without the violent contradictions of no-good dancer. Like quite a few Another "class" of people also the latter's character.) twists in this plot, this scene jumps inhabit the camp. They are the Johnny may be macho in body but Dirty Dancing from one stage of "dance people", employed to dance he has a heart of gold: it's the rich fantasy to another. By now, it is with the patrons, among whom are boys you need to be wary of. nothing less than fantastic. lonely middle-aged women. Baby's fantasy contains other Dirty Dancing lacks the The "dance people" are domiciled pleasures. While Johnny may lead consummate filmmaker's skill that separately in smoke-filled ghetto-like the dance, at first anyway, she takes Carlos Saura brought to Carmen, for rooms where they can dance "dirtily" the lead (her class has done her a instance, a film in which flamenco to suit themselves, to a gutsy, favour and given her self.