| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Apart from the odd fact that Western culture seems incapable of separating the concept “Dirty” from the practice of human sexuality, this is rather a good attempt to tell a love story through the medium of dance. The dancing stands in successfully for most actual sexual activity; being all the more erotic, passionate and expressive for that fact.
The dance here is more successfully-performed on stage, but the intimacy of cinema and the lack of a need to project emotions easily trump this; creating an uneasy tension on screen that appropriately-matches the cultural tensions shown; concerning a culture in transition from rigid and banal conformity to a freer expression of desire.
However, this class-war summer romance partly defeats its own analogy to the dance as a vertical expression of a horizontal desire by introducing sex that is a little too literal. Nevertheless, the emotional force of this drama is its most important aspect here, with sentiment unashamed of its feelings. This perfectly fits the emotional changes of puberty and the great fear of affluent Whites that the expression of feeling will invalidate the emotionally-repressive social hierarchy from which they materially benefit. As in Romeo & Juliet, sexual promiscuity is contrasted with love; materialism with ethical values - in the same way that the middle class hate the poor yet go out of their way to have slumming sex with them in order to pretend that they have no fear of the poor.
A good coming-of-age story replete with an enthusiastic virgin and a muscle-bound apparently-bad boy. And, underneath the pop-video aesthetic, there is a sound story of young, star-crossed love. While not in the William Shakespeare class, this is nonetheless highly-effective, emotionally, for all that and its various plot-holes.
Jennifer GREY and Patrick SWAYZE are both naturals for this story and play their parts with perfect aplomb. Both are fabulous dancers - the former perfect in the ugly duckling role. This goes a great way to making the entire film more literally-plausible than it is emotionally.
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