52 Films by Women Vol 8. 24. Fancy Dance (Director: Erica Tremblay)
Another debut
feature. Another film about life on a Native American reservation. Except Fancy Dance, co-writer-director Erica Tremblay’s tale of
a barely investigated disappearance, goes into the wider world. Her
protagonist, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has a white American father, Frank (Shea
Whigham), who wasn’t exactly around after Jax’s mom died but has since
remarried. He seeks custody of Jax’s thirteen-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel
Deroy-Olson) after Roki’s stripper-prostitute mother disappears. Quite why Jax’s
brother JJ (Ryan Begay) who works in law enforcement, more as an apologist than
a deterrent to crime, doesn’t offer to take care of the girl is moot. Perhaps
Frank isn’t his father; their scenes together don’t vibrate with familial
tension.
It is hard to attach
a genre to Fancy Dance. One can scarcely call it a thriller, though
there are some suspenseful set pieces. It isn’t a drama. Jax’s character is too
sketchily drawn. It is a mystery of sorts, though not focused on apprehending
any kind of evildoer. It is about indigenous people struggling to get by,
resorting to criminality, but understanding their limits.
Jax is a bad
influence on her niece, though at least she is kind of fun with it. She is the
sort of aunt who would wash herself by the lake deliberately attracting the
gaze of a fisherman while her niece would steal his valuables and car keys,
kept nonsensically by his bait box. Having stolen his car, Jax drives it to a
fence, who offers her $350. Lakeside larcenists can’t be choosers. Auntie
splits the Jax-pot, adding dollar bills to Roki’s powwow fund. Roki wants to
head to a community event to be reunited with mom, whom Jax repeatedly tells
her will be there, though why mom doesn’t have a mobile phone that Roki can
call is one of the film’s more perplexing details.
Tremblay co-wrote Fancy Dance with Miciana Alise. They ace one character
in particular, Frank’s second wife, Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski). She’s the sort
of woman who imposes her will on her new husband as a form of test. You never
believe for a second that she cares about Roki, but nevertheless wants to adopt
her. She does not possess an ounce of white liberal guilt. For her, it is about
having a daughter she can bond with, though clearly car theft is off the
agenda; you sense she’s more into shopping. A combination of strong writing and
Wasilewski’s nail curling performance – credible but cringe – Nancy gives the
film a shot of no-genre realism.
Frank is less of a
man than a crumpled dollar bill in a check shirt. He’s absolved himself of his
guilt. He gives into Nancy through the path of least resistance. By the end, he
has to admit (in ‘fifteen’-rated language) that he messed up. By this time, a
shot has been fired.
Linguistically the
film alternates between Cayuga and English. According to Tremblay, there are
perhaps only twenty Cayuga speakers left, but she is determined to keep the
language alive by having her characters use it. In the film, Jax teaches Roki
words. They can communicate without being understood by others. For the most
part, there is barely a scene where language is used dramatically in the
service of the plot to reveal or conceal something, except when the pair
encounter an officer from Homeland Security, and Jax tells Roki in Cayuga, ‘I’m
your mother.’
Lies and deceit
overwhelm the narrative. Afraid for her sister, Jax lies to her niece insisting
that she’ll be reunited with her mother at the powwow. She hands out fliers at
a bar. ‘Have you seen my sister?’ ‘Yes,’ says some sadistic bad ass, ‘on posters
all over town.’ ‘You could have just said no,’ sulks Jax. Gladstone has an
opaque face. You can’t always tell what her character is thinking, though she
registers anxiety. There’s no levity to Jax. She has spent her life being
overlooked. She has one intimate scene with a stripper with whom she has a
relationship. The stripper sits astride Jax. Jax looks pleasingly overwhelmed
rather than nurtured.
Before she moved to
documentaries, television and her first feature, Tremblay was a stripper and
sex worker. Her past informs the film. However, Fancy Dance doesn’t
have a cathartic narrative in which a character confronts and overcomes the
forces that drove her to this point. Rather it runs on quiet determination, an
insistence that someone knows something. It is just a matter of following up
leads and hoping that someone will slip out a detail because they feel sorry
for you, whatever.
In an early scene,
Jax takes over her missing sister’s dope run and places herself in danger at
the tail end of a sale. ‘Are you wearing a wire?’ she is asked, forced against
a wall. The angry customer finds a pouch in her pocket that resembles a figure or
a keepsake. Later, we will discover that it contains powder.
The drama kicks in
when police turn up at Jax’s house. Though she hasn’t submitted the adoption paperwork,
Roki is taken away from her. ‘As a convicted felon, you are an unsuitable
guardian,’ a cop tells her. The cop isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t make Frank
and Nancy – named after Sinatra, obviously – more suitable. At any rate, the
parting is wrenching, not least because Jax doesn’t have a business model
without Roki. Roki can do three-cup ‘follow the pinenut’ – middle school
scamming – and slip into a woman’s changing room to steal a customer’s car
keys, purse and gun. The latter is a particularly bad choice.
Is it any wonder
folks think badly of Jax because of her criminality? She visits Roki in her new
home, gets her to remove the fan panel with the impossible-to-refuse
invitation, ‘come on, I’m taking you to the powwow.’ Roki, entirely unused to three-person
family dinners, is eager to slip out, but this is a kidnapping, plain and
simple. She leaves a note, ‘back in a few days.’
Gladstone has a low,
matter of fact voice that is persuasive in spite of itself, though at one
point, after Jax and Roki steal a car, she starts shouting euphorically. Aunt
and niece are in a safe space, able to raise their voices, but they can be
quiet as well.
While on the run
(read: on way to powwow), they break into a house that has furniture and a
switched-on fridge with some cookie dough in it, but nothing else. Cue the
baking of biscuits. ‘It’s for sale,’ Jax explains. ‘Sometimes they put stuff in
houses so you can imagine what your stuff would look like it.’ The house has a
pool. Jax calls JJ then tosses her mobile phone into it.
She visits a woman
whose son knew her sister. The older woman answers the questions she wants to
and then tells Jax to leave, raising a rifle. Hair-trigger temper. You don’t
want to mess.
‘Do you know what
you’ve done?’ JJ asks Frank. ‘They’ll send the militia after her.’ JJ tries to
get the cops to also look into Roki’s mother’s disappearance, but they remain
focused on the kidnapping.
The second biggest
dramatic development is Roki’s ‘moon’. She has her first period. Jax
improvises, but the blood flow breaks her defence. This is a film that pays
considerable attention to menstruation. It isn’t a one-off catalyst for a scene
but to some extent a running narrative. Arguably, Tremblay’s film offers one of
the most vivid descriptions of living with menstruation depicted in cinema -
not the pain, but the flow. Roki is weirdly euphoric. She goes to a diner with
Jax and orders everything strawberry on the menu. ‘A birthday?’ the waitress
asks. ‘My first period,’ Roki replies. The waitress pauses awkwardly.
When Roki tries to
steal sanitary products, Jax tells her not to. ‘Not from here.’ It is this
gesture that attracts the gentleman from Homeland Security who invites Roki
into his car, while he checks Jax’s ID, actually that of her sister. ‘I bled
all over that policeman’s car seat,’ Roki reveals later, with some amount of
joy.
‘Don’t ever take off
your bag,’ Jax tells her in what constitutes a major piece of aunt advice. But
after a scene in which a shot is fired, Roki confesses her mistake. She goes
back for it, while Jax hides in the long grass.
Roki’s period also
has a symbolic link to a red truck. A man driving such a vehicle was seen
waiting outside for Jax’s sister. Jax tells JJ to find it. He does so. The
prognosis is negative.
The finale takes
place at the powwow. Jax is inappropriately dressed, walking among the dancers,
whose long cloaks slice the air. There are police. She will almost certainly be
arrested. We discover that not only are there mother daughter dances, but
dances performed by the victims of injustice - a lamentation ritual. Not
exactly an occasion for putting your best foot forward. But as Jax discovers,
it is inclusive, and that’s the point.
The virtue of
Tremblay’s filmmaking is in the celebrations of small victories, moments
without apparent sentimentality. Emotion is expressed someplace else, not in
front of the camera, not in front of us. Tremblay made her film for Indigenous
audiences, but also to tell us what Indigenous people will not show us. They
are proud. They are private.
Reviewed at Ritzy
Picturehouse, Screen Two, Brixton, South London, Tuesday 26 June 2024, 18:00
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