You could call Love & Dance “Billy Elliott meets Dirty Dancing,” but this intimate film from Israel’s Eitan Anner defies such facile categorization. It effortlessly teases out larger issues: xenophobia, self-image and the nature of love. Twirling among the characters on its central stage—the linoleum floor of a dance studio—pathos mingles with humor and Russian fatalism partners with sabra toughness in a mixed-up, multicultural choreography that reflects Israel itself.
We first see Chen (Vladimir Volov), a skinny, doe-eyed boy, half-hidden behind his camcorder, which simultaneously serves as shield and decoder in his topsy-turvy world—the gritty tenements of coastal Ashdod (a “goddam refugee camp”), where striving natives struggle alongside immigrants for scraps from Israel’s table.
Chen’s Russian-born mother (Oksana Korostyshevskaya), a catering waitress, is beautiful but worn down by life. His gruff, Israeli father (Avi Kushnir), a wedding photographer, displays a firm work ethic but just as much ennui. Their marital strife proves a microcosm of the broader clash between Ashdod’s sabras and its romantic but world-weary Soviet immigrants. Chen must straddle the divide.
His father enrolls him in Judo classes, but Chen’s a lover, not a fighter. In the opening scene, he leaves a wedding reception where his parents are working and discovers a glass-smashing brawl between the bride and groom. He records his parents stealing a rare romantic moment on the dance floor and captures the heartbreaking look on his mother’s face when her boss orders her to resume clearing glasses.
When Chen’s mother loses her job, she listlessly watches as laundry piles up, enraging and mystifying her husband, who storms out the door—having forgotten that it’s their wedding anniversary. To cheer his mother up, Chen sneaks out with her to a dance at the local recreation center. There, he discovers a tiny dancer his own age—the graceful but vulnerable Natalie (Valeria Voevodin).
Chen’s infatuation with Natalie leads him to finagle a spot in the ballroom dance class taught by Yulia (Jenya Dodina), another fading Slavic flower, who, with her pretty-boy husband, Roman, offers locals an international menu of dance classes.
“Look in your partner’s eyes,” she instructs Chen’s class. “Rumba is a dance of love.” But to see them, you wouldn’t know it. While Yulia urges her young charges to win a regional dance competition, she sees Roman flirting with bellydancing housewives down the hall. As she moonlights selling cosmetics at a drugstore, he mooches money for drinks and mourns for their lost careers as European dance champions.
Yulia’s students, meanwhile, dance out their own versions of the age-old battle between the sexes. Natalie, Chen’s crush, dances strictly with Arthur, a sinuous prince of the parquet and a bully who insults her as they spin. The fatherless Sharon (Talya Raz), a spunky Israeli with Princess Leia braids, dances only with herself.
Slowly Sharon accepts Chen as her partner and begins to trust him. As a waltz swells in the background, the twosome count beats on her building’s roof in a dazzling desert light. The camera swirls up and away to reveal a vista of white water tanks and satellite dishes in a shot that improbably recalls The Red Balloon’s romantic views of the slate Parisian rooftops.
Chen also pays a visit to Natalie in a grim tenement where her grandmother mutters in Russian about suicide. Staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Natalie proves resigned to anything but the possibility of anonymity. If she can win the dance contest and appear on TV, she confides to Chen, strangers will call her by name, and “I’ll be sure that it’s me, and that my face is there.”
Treachery is everywhere. Chen spies Roman tomcatting in town. Chen himself makes up stories about judo competitions to help cover his mother’s clandestine dance outings. Without a thought for Sharon, he asks Natalie to be his dance partner.
Amid the emotional turmoil, Chen’s father dispenses advice. Dancing is for Russians, he tells his son. “Russians…think every one of them was born a poet and a doctor when, in reality, they’re security guards and cashiers.”
Things spin out of control: Chen’s father gets violent at home and his mother throws him out. Natalie appears to be losing her mind. Sharon no longer speaks to Chen. Even Yulia has given in to despair, admitting that to dance is to lie.
But Chen somehow knows better. He has learned that to dance is to trust, and he is nothing if not trustworthy. At the almost surreally happy dance competition, he unwittingly saves Yulia from a disastrous decision. And, almost despite himself, he spares Sharon the romantic disillusionment that is the inexorable fate of every other woman in his life.—Mandy Katz
