When FLASHDANCE pauses from montaging for a couple minutes here and there it's about an 18-year-old (Jennifer Beals) who works in a steel mill by day and dances at a bar by night. This is the weirdest bar you'll ever see. It's blue collar and has dancing but the dancing is NOT stripping. Instead, it's this series of increasingly avant-garde performance art pieces. I feel like real steel workers would get pissed at all the shenanigans and goings on and walk out on the performances but instead they love it. I guess I've misjudged them.
Beals is romanced by her boss (Michael Nouri) and hangs out with her co-workers, another dancer who wants to be a figure skater (Sunny Johnson) and a burger flipper who wants to be a comedian (Kyle T. Heffner). She's also besties with an elderly retired dancer (Lilia Skala) who encourages her to try out for the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. Beals dreams of going there but is alternatively scared of rejection and put off by the snootiness of the school.
So, what sucks about this movie? Since it's almost entirely comprised of montages, there's very little in the way of character development. In fact, there's very little in the way of characterization at all. We're left with basically no idea of what kind of person Beals is supposed to be, other than someone who wants to dance. Granted, that could be the driving force and central aspect of someone's life, I'm not arguing that, but the way the movie is cobbled together and written, she seems to be one character one moment and a totally different character the next and we're left wondering what she's thinking.
For instance, towards the beginning of the films he goes to confession and tells the priest she's thought about sex. This comes off as charming and naive and like she's kind of conservative even though she's a maniac on the floor. That's an interesting dynamic. Until she goes on a date with her boss and inexplicably starts erotically eating shellfish before massaging his crotch under the table with her foot. Where'd this come from? You could argue it's to show off in front of her boss's ex-wife, who shows up to rain on everyone's parade, except Beals is already in full-on seductress mode BEFORE the wife shows up. It comes out of nowhere.
Also, montages aren't bad, in and of themselves, but it's strange when they seem to exist in a limbo. For instance, there's a sequence where Beals and her friends go to the gym to work out. Cool, I imagine dancers have to go work out. It's a part of their lives. This makes sense. But there's no surrounding context to the sequence. It's even shot against an empty white backdrop as if they're just working out in some MTV music video completely detached from the rest of the film. What's the deal?
What's good about the movie? Well, Beals is great in it, even though her character makes no sense. Most of the dance sequences are fun to watch. The movie's beautifully shot. And the soundtrack is great. Even though the movie doesn't earn it with characters or story, you still get all emotional when "What a Feeling" comes on the soundtrack, whether it's set to shots of Beals riding her bike around Pittsburgh, or set to her triumphant audition at the dance school.
I guess the problems and the strengths of this movie both arise from the fact that it attempted to perfect cinematic shorthand to the point where the filmmakers expected shortcuts to work for everything, in place of characters and story. In a way, this was ahead of its time and probably influential on many similarly vapid movies to come. So, it gets credit for being a pioneer, and I guess is good at what it sets out to do, but with all of these ingredients, it could have been both popular AND had some substance. But they chose to skip the substance.
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