Desert Dancer (Richard Raymond, 2015): USA

Reviewed by Logan Kovarick. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2015.

On Tuesday night, Santa Barbara Film Festival got under way with underwhelming U.S. premiere of Desert Dancer. The film stars Frieda Pinto, Richie Reece, Tom Cullen, and directed by the, clearly, first timer Richard Raymond. A pretty much all british team of filmmakers tackling an Iranian true story of a young man named Afshin Ghaffaria studying in the city, where there is expressive suppression. Art, singing, and dancing are punishable by prison or death. However, amongst this suppression, Afshin and his friends create an underground dance club where they ultimately plan to reach their goal of dancing in front of a crowd, a seemingly impossible path to go down. The film’s ideology of freedom of expression being punished, is powerful, important, and relevant. However, it is executed so very poorly.

Saturday Night Fever, Footloose, Slumdog Millionaire, and Desert Dancer. That will be the only time you hear Desert Dancer mentioned in the same breath with those classics. Every character, extra, song-sung, or news anchor in this film, spoke seamless and fluent english. I’ll stop right there. How can I sit in my seat and watch a true story set in Iran where everyone speaks english, even the news anchors? Thats just not how it is and I’ve seen it first hand. Its not rocket science. Immediately, I’m taken out of this world Raymond is trying to create from the get-go, and in turn, he’s broken verisimilitude and now spends the whole film trying to climb up hill, making up for it. He does this by amateurish writing, bland acting, average production value, and a weak sense of location. The desert locations, and riot scenes could have been filmed in the San Fernando Valley and I wouldn’t know the difference. You want to hook an audience? Establish a sense of location from the start, a depth of motivation from the characters, a depth of relationship and camaraderie, and reasons for any paradoxes. For example, tell me why everyone speaks fluent english. Maybe tell me this part of Iran was taken over by the british government 50 years ago, and in turn they all speak fluent english. Its ridiculous and laughable, but you’re telling your audience the reasaon for this paradox. Its hard capture an audience when you break truth of such basic things in a true story.

I saw the film at the world class Arlington Theater on opening night where the cameras were on, the lights were bright, and the step and repeat was flooded by the films cast. An experience that made up for the lack of heart and depth of character two thousand people saw on screen. At the end of the day, Desert Dancer had the pieces in place to have a very sound and convincing narrative on screen, but didnt execute it to the tee.