SHORT TAKE

AND THEN WE DANCED

Director: Levan Akin

Country/Distributor: Sweden/Georgia/France, Music Box Films

Opening: February 7

Levan Akin’s Swedish-Georgian co-production is a handsome, engaging, but predictable graft of familiar genres: the passion play of a young dancer, craving a spot in the company, and the queer coming-of-age parable, amidst repressive forces of family and tradition. Akin’s script fuses these conflicts by devoting his hero Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) to the art of Georgian dance, where projections of virility and “masculine” comportment have grown only more sacrosanct with time.

The best thing going for the film is its athletic camera, weaving around and between characters’ bodies, observant of their dynamism while evoking, too, their roiling ambitions and unvoiced yearnings. Gifted cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, who similarly enlivened the much edgier 2014 gender-fluid, endows Akin’s film with a lush, ruddy color palette. The script, unfortunately, is more perfunctory. The audiences likeliest to see are the surest to know where it’s headed, and in what order. Nearly everyone obeys the usual choreographies: Merab’s fond but under-explored female partner; his new rival in the company, a strapping peer from unknown parts; his pessimistic parents, themselves ex-dancers; his iron-willed artistic directors. At least Merab’s older brother David (Giorgi Tsereteli), set up as a nemesis, squandering his talents on booze, belatedly reveals some unexpected tenderness.