A Midsummer's Night Post

The plain yet effective plant and payoff scheme structuring "The dancer upstairs", hinging on the use of a song, is the most distinct and powerful characteristic to have struck me of this movie. It is also the most conspicuous added value of the film version as opposed to the original book by Nicholas Shakespeare. To be sure, it's one of those precious moments when cinema and music merge in an unforgettable way.

At the eve of his 12 years long revolutionary enterprise, Ezequiel - brazenly shaped after Peru's Shining Path's leader, down to his psoriasis condition - is riding in the car with a few cronies in the middle of the night, on his way to launch the rebellion in the sierra. They don't utter a word, even less so as they run over a cop at a checkpoint. During the trip, they listen to the radio playing a rare performance by Nina Simone where she gives a long introduction to the song "Who knows where the time goes". The singer introduces it by digressing with her toughts on time, its impalpability, its meaning for our life, its being crucial and yet, paradoxically vain.

"Why is she talking?", asks one of Ezequiel's men.
"She is getting ready to sing", is the leader's answer.

For brevity's sake, it could be said that what follows in the next two hours is Ezequiel's performance of terror and violence; it is his own song we are "listening" to; all the while we witness the patient and superhuman effort of a solitary police detective, Agustin, who brings him to justice after struggling not only with the revolutionary forces, but also with the army and the political establishment of the barely disguised Peru of the 1980s.

Nina Simone's lengthy introduction to the song, where she indulges in an improvised monologue on the nature of time, is played along the images in a way you don't usually see in a film: it is, after all, some very dense talking, apparently unrelated to the story, delivered by someone who is not a character, yet breaks into the plot.

It is at the very end, then, that the songs starts playing again. But this time it takes a totally different connotation. This time, the song preludes bitter-sweetly to Agustin's new life, maybe the country's new life, its new "performance". Indeed, Ezequiel has been handed in now. Agustin has won his double struggle, but with a personal cost: his newly found, impossible love, Yolanda, turned out to be one the closest of Ezequiel's people.
Yolanda used to be Agustin's daughter dance teacher. The dancer referred to in the title, though, is not her; it is Ezequiel himself, who lives in hiding one story above her dancing studio. He his the 'dancer upstairs'.


But there is more to it. Now that his job is done, Agustin is finally free to take time for his family which, willy-nilly, he has been disregarding during the frantic pursuit of the revolutionary leader. And the film version features a beautiful closure of the story, with Agustin barely making it to his daughter end-of-the-year dance.
We see him breathless, walking up the stairs to reach the ballroom. Once he is up, he lingers behind the glass doors and stops there, as to not disturb the performance. His daughter is dancing. She is the dancer upstairs now, and she couldn't be anymore different than Ezequiel. In fact, the dichotomies here are several and poignant: young girl/old man; beauty/ugliness; healthy/unhealthy; dancing/immobile; renewed hopeful country/decadent violent country. Or, more concisely, positive/negative.

Unlikely as it may seem, it just looks and sounds as the little girl is dancing to Nina Simone's song, as though the penetration of that piece of music into the movie, having transited from extrafilmic to metafilmic, is now complete.