Desert Dancer (Richard Raymond, 2015): USA

Reviewed by Magali Vautrin. Viwed at SBIFF 2015.

 Desert Dancer was the movie projected at the Opening Night of the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2015. Directed by Richard Raymond and staring the “Prince of Persia” Reece Ritchie, Nazanin Boniadi, one of the Homeland TV show star or also the great Freida Pinto known by most of us by her performance in Slumdog Millionaire.

This movie was inspired by a true story. “I read this story in a news paper … I decided to make a movie about it” .

Afshin Ghaffarian is an Iranian boy who has for only passion dancing. Unfortunately dancing is forbidden in his country. He and his friends are going to risk their life in oder to become dancers despite a nationwide dancing ban.

I find the idea of the story to be interesting but I felt the movie was a little bit to much of a cliché. I supposed the real Afshin struggled way more in his life than what the movie shows us. It also disturbed me a lot that the story is supposed to takes place in Iran and everyone is speaking in English. I think that instead of having such a huge cast, the director should have maybe picked some less famous actor, who talk in the Iranian language , and then yeah the movie would have had more impact in my opinion.  I also found the time to be long after the second act of the movie; and there were some unnecessary scenes toward the end.

I have been doing dance for 15 years and think that the dancing part of the movie weren’t good enough. As the audience, I did not believe in their dancing capacity, particularly the boys choreography . Fortunately Frieda Pinto was here to bring up the dance level of this movie. Also what disturbed me a  lot  was the music, even if I was pleased to hear M.I.A (we can notice that the singer participate to each Freida Pinto films. ex: Slumdog), I did not really understood from where was the music coming (ex: desert scene).

I did enjoy the cinematography, the lights and the texture of this movie, very realistic but won’t recommend this movie .