By Preston Wilder
Fame! (Fame!) I’m gonna live forever… Couldn’t tell you what Irene Cara’s doing these days – fame, it turns out, is a fleeting evanescent thing – but the Fame concept will indeed live forever, life at a New York college for the performing arts being part of the deal in the loveably wide-eyed High Strung. The students include Ruby (Keenan Kampa), a nice girl who’s new in the big city, her bestie and fellow dancer Jazzy (Sonoya Mizuno) plus arrogant young artists like violin virtuoso Kyle (Richard Southgate). The teachers all seem to be either silver-bearded Eastern European profs – paging Mr Shorofsky! – or no-nonsense older women with zero patience for teenage girls and their weak-willed ways: “No excuses! Pull yourself together!”.
The gimmick here is that Fame is being cross-bred with the street-dancing style of the Step Up franchise – though the overriding tone is strongly conservative. Step Up (or Save the Last Dance) at least brought classically-trained white girls in direct contact with the rude life of the ghetto, but Ruby in High Strung doesn’t actually fall in love with a street-dancing (read: African-American) boy. Instead she falls in love with Johnny (Nicholas Galitzine), a “sexy-fierce” young Brit who wears a permanently tragic expression, plays violin in the subway, and is possibly the least threatening illegal immigrant in movie history. The street dancers, called the SwitchSteps, are Johnny’s next-door neighbours, their only function being to dance in the background and look supremely grateful just to be invited to the party, i.e. the climactic dance contest.
This is not a very cool movie, in fact it’s profoundly uncool – and we haven’t even mentioned Paolo, the bad-boy minor character whom the film actively disapproves of (he almost gets Jazzy expelled, for goodness sake) because he rides a bike and may be “chemically altered”. Don’t get involved with druggie bikers named Paolo, girls – think of your careers! Yet the square, earnest outlook of this low-budget movie – it was made outside the big-studio system, partly shot in Romania to save money – is exactly why it works so well. There’s a scene early on, Ruby tearfully saying goodbye to her mum as she arrives in New York, that would be a throwaway in any Step Up film; Step Up films are made for teens, and no self-respecting teen wants to dwell on something as uncool as missing your parents. Yet director Michael Damian makes a proper scene of it, letting the actors emote and bringing out the wrenching feel – on both sides – of abandoning one’s child to the wide world. It’s not especially well done, but the fact that it was done at all is startling.
Best of all, the flipside of this aching sincerity is a sincerity about music – “a link to the soul,” says the Eastern European prof, another line you probably wouldn’t hear (at least not in that po-faced way) in a Step Up film. “The music is always there, burning inside me,” affirms Johnny. “I’m a dancer”; “Then start acting like one!” goes a typical exchange, dancing being a sacred vocation, a gift to be shared like the Word of God. The dance scenes are impressive, and I speak as someone who’s always scoffed at the graceless high-energy gyrating in Step Up. There’s a reason why the name ‘Keenan Kampa’ seems unfamiliar: she’s an actual ballerina who danced with the Mariinsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, and makes her film debut in High Strung. The contest at the end comes with some proper choreography (don’t bother asking how our heroes found the time to rehearse such elaborate numbers), not just the usual frenetic hip-hop.
The Fame template is essentially sentimental: it’s about being gifted and young, and feeling things – artistic, passionate things – more intensely because you’re young. That sentimentality is why it’s easy to forgive the bad, cheesy elements in High Strung, absurd devices like the middle-aged couple who appear just long enough to get Ruby and Johnny on the dancefloor (then conveniently vanish, leaving them to get on with it) or endearingly dopey attempts at New York ‘edge’ (a homeless guy on the street calling out “What’s goin’ on baby?”, stuff like that). Ruby and Jazzy are girly to the point of having pillow fights, while Johnny and his rival Kyle square up to each other at a posh cocktail party. “You want to settle this outside?” “I’m fine to settle it right here,” replies Johnny – and grabs a violin from the orchestra, challenging Kyle to … a violin-off! They pummel each other with high notes, play some mean pizzicato, then physically duel with their violin bows, like an Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone of the string section. You gotta love it.
DIRECTED BY Michael Damian
STARRING Keenan Kampa, Nicholas Galitzine, Sonoya Mizuno
US 2016 96 mins
