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Friday, February 27, 2004
Hot music drives 'Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights' beyond the ordinary
It's been nearly 20 years since "Dirty Dancing," an ugly duckling-to-swan romance set in an innocent world of early 1960s rock 'n' roll rebellion, became a feel-good romantic phenomenon. Now comes not so much a sequel as a second edition.
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"Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" once again follows the flowering of a young, sheltered woman as she becomes entranced by the earthy, sexy abandon of dance and appalled by the class divisions of her protected world of privilege.
This time around, class brain and social klutz Katey (Romola Garai, the innocent little sister of "Nicholas Nickleby" with a flavorless mid-Atlantic accent passing for American) is dropped into Batista's Cuba, circa 1958. Out of step with her classmates, ugly Americans in training who lounge around her luxury hotel pool and sneer at the locals, she is miserable until she gets a gander at the hot, hot, hot street dancing in the local quarter of town.
When young waiter Javier (Diego Luna of "Et Tu Mama, Tambien") invites her to the local nightclubs the tourists don't see, the ballroom-dancing American tosses off her white sweaters and learns a new way of moving to the beat. Angry young man Javier, who single-handedly supports an impoverished family while his big brother fights Batista in la Revolution, becomes her partner for the big dance contest: a Mickey and Judy in a culture of class struggle.
Though inspired by the true story of choreographer JoAnn Jansen as an American teenager in Cuba, this is pure fairy tale. The tourist paradise of Batista's corrupt, crime-riddled Cuba is contrasted with the sweaty, hearty, sexy Coo-ba of Havana's working-class population, where revolution is brewing under the driving salsa beat of its nightclubs and the blonde child of privilege is improbably tolerated by the brothers of rebellion.
But even as the prosaic script gets lost in the intoxicating fantasy of the bloodless revolution, the hot heartbeat of the music drives the film with pure energy. Remove the naive social politics and it's just a story of teenage rebellion and romance set to a beat that will have any audience nodding to its rhythms.
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