Writers: Miciana Alise and Erica Tremblay
Director: Erica Tremblay
Of the two films that Lily Gladstone is in at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, it is Fancy Dance that better shows off her acting skills. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s latest epic, Gladstone has little to do for the second half of the film and perhaps is a little two-dimensional, especially in comparison to Fancy Dance where her character is more complex. Here, she plays a woman desperate to find her missing sister.
Combining the genres of road movie and police procedural, Erica Tremblay’s film depicts a Native American community on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma. Jax (Gladstone) is searching for her sister. She goes to the local strip club where her sister used to work asking the johns if they have seen her. Jax also has own reasons for going to the bar; her lover works there. Jax pays the going rate and tips generously.
Living with Jax is Roki, Jax’s sister’s teenage daughter, but when social services find out about Roki’s mother’s disappearance, they remove Roki from Jax’s care. Jax has a criminal record and they find alcohol and weed in the house. Roki is placed in the care of her white grandparents, Jax’s father and his new wife.
Roki is looking forward to the annual powwow, a coming together of the Seneca-Cayuga people. She hopes that her mother will be there. But her grandparents suggest that she take up ballet instead with her grandmother gifting her an old pair of ballet shoes. The two cultures – Seneca-Cayuga and white America – seem very far apart. One night Jax appears at Roki’s window and the two escape in a car. They are determined to attend the powwow together.
The relationship between Jax and Roki is at the heart of this movie and both actors are utterly convincing. Gladstone’s Jax is tough, but vulnerable, always treating her niece if she is younger than her years. Isabel Deroy-Olson’s Roki is tough too, but her vulnerability is hidden deep below the confidence of youth and what she thinks of as justice. Together they learn from each other as required by the road movie genre.
This America is a harsh one; recriminations fly in Jax’s community. No one is to be trusted in a world where drugs and drug-dealing rule. There’s talk that Jax’s sister was dealing and in the kitchen of one of her relations packets of drugs are made up on the table. A society neglected by wider America, reservation life is not easy and is made worse by poverty,
We learn about this life and yet it never feels like a sociology lesson. We are given no lectures and, apart from Roki’s grandmother, no character acts as a newcomer to the community who needs everything explained for the sake of an uninitiated viewer. Instead, director Erica Tremblay shows us what life is like for the Seneca-Cayuga people without exposition, from the fringed jackets that are worn for dancing to the shotgun that leans alongside one woman’s chair.
Indeed, this lack of context ensures that the end scenes are unexpectedly moving, especially when we realise that we should see Jax’s sister’s disappearance as an allegory. Clever and dignified, Fancy Dance is one of the hits of the London Film Festival.
Fancy Dance is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
