Flashdance (1983)
Genre: Dance/Romance
Release Year: 1983
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Adrian Lyne
Content Warnings: nudity, sensual touching/imagery, profanity, sexual language
Overview
In the '80s, anything could happen... especially when you took your passion and made it happen. From a mish-mash story of girl power, steel mill canoodling, and a can-do attitude held up with hairspray sprang two Billboard mega-hits — Irene Cara's iconic "What A Feeling" and Michael Sembello's relentlessly catchy "Maniac" — and America's third highest-grossing motion picture in 1983.
Beloved for its glamorous, wide-eyed optimism paired tango-like with a romantic subplot, Flashdance spotlights everything memorable about the artistic and cultural zenith that was the 1980s: big hair, bold dreams, big love, and a slew of synthesizers swathing life in that colorful, glitter-smattered haze. But how does Fatal Attraction (1987) director Adrian Lyne's inspiration sensation hold up over forty years later? Unfortunately, not so well, sans a whole lotta mousse.
Plot Recap
The passionate young Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) toils by day at a steel mill while harboring a heartfelt dream: transforming her moonlight dancing hobby into a career. When her boss, Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri), discovers his employee's talents at a local establishment, he pursues both Alex's love and success, inspiring her to reconsider applying to an esteemed dance school. As Alex navigates obstacles and emotional landmines along her sweat-and-tear-filled journey — her friends do the same — she confronts personal hang-ups, convictions, and pride, her mission soundtracked by rousing synth-pop numbers.
Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals), Paramount Pictures
The Charp, the Dull, & the Recommendable
Flashdance, melding the feminine pursuit of the American Dream into a gooey romance and topping off its empowerment plot with a side cast of success-hungry young hopefuls, is as '80s as a film can get. It's grandiose, dramatic as a streak of electric blue eyeshadow, poppy, amorous, and brazen. High on its own aerosol-filled message, though, this film/musical/patchy coming-of-age drama insufficiently represents ambitious and financially strapped young dreamers: not for lack of plot potential or material, but for lack of trying.
Flashdance might have achieved something loftier had it executed its simple premise with coherent storytelling and better-coordinated cinematography. As it stands, this is a bizarrely shot, edited, and spoken film.
Heart-to-hearts between key characters abruptly end; quotes, conversations, and other weighty dialogue lack a natural or finished feeling; and awkwardly diced scenes and their peculiar brevity erode the characters' relationships, resulting in poorly fleshed-out, inauthentic, and only semi-realistic connections. Had Flashdance allocated reasonable durations and smoother transitions to its cast's interactions, half the awkwardness would've dissolved. Unfortunately, the many random fits and starts, like San Diego stop-and-go traffic, grind my gears and prove far too jarring to excuse.
True love is forged in steel... and nice sentiments about going after dreams, Paramount Pictures
None of this entirely discredits the film's core message. Flashdance's "go get 'em" attitude, delivered with classic, old-school American zeal and some alluring dance scenes, is refreshing; Alex Owens makes a likable protagonist whose hard work and emotional connection to dancing feels more real than anything else in this movie. But if the filmmakers wanted to land a bigger impact, they should have taken their story, its themes, and haphazard sub-plots and actually done something with them rather than whisk them through the motions.
Does Alex's supposed deep bond with dance mentor/life coach Hanna Long (Lilia Skala) really matter when their relationship appears only in brief moments and consists primarily of cliché, Instagram caption-level pep talks? The steel mill CEO and Alex's boyfriend, Nick Hurley, is handsome, but aside from coordinating Alex's eventual dance school audition — a stroke of genuine kindness — he's flat, his attraction to Alex more lustful than anything substantial. The movie never develops his and Alex's relationship beyond sex and some throwaway platitudes about pursuing dreams.
One mildly intriguing conflict sees a seething Alex lash out at Nick after he places a strategic phone call to give Alex a (literal) leg up in her dream dance school's invite-only audition. Alex doesn't want Nick's help; she feels it is wrong to succeed with his assistance instead of going solo.
What a feeling, Paramount Pictures
Viewers can sympathize with Alex's craving for individual accomplishment ("what you know") vs. her well-connected boyfriend's intervention ("who you know"). For women, especially before modern culture encouraged our passions, dream chasing came with — and occasionally still does come with — certain barriers and/or malicious gossip surrounding our success.
A woman's boyfriend helping her achieve a career milestone might've resulted in rumors about her sleeping her way to the top or relying on "the patriarchy" for favors and hand-outs. In one of the film's finer moments, Alex swallows her pride, accepts that the "who you know" may be her only chance at realizing her dream, and wows the judges at her prestigious audition after she decides to attend it. Most successful people rely on someone bigger and more influential than them for career elevation, and it's a decent reminder for viewers who might feel prideful like Alex.
Highlights and likable moments aside, Flashdance's inexcusably rushed pace and sloppy, shrug-filled writing — destroyers of any existing substance — make the movie more akin to a Dhar Mann life lesson video than a box office champion. Indeed, the Mann himself, no stranger to "borrowing" movie plots and casually replicating them in his YouTube videos, could easily churn out a serviceable Flashdance-style story... whose quality probably wouldn't differ much from the real thing.
Flashdance's most frustrating quality is that it's a bad movie — not one you hate, but still bad — when it doesn't have to be. Its simple plot and characters contain the ingredients for success, but the filmmakers cooked the film on low heat, producing half-baked and only semi-savory results.
She's a maniac, Paramount Pictures
Verdict
The clumsily choreographed story in Flashdance frequently trips over its own feet, spraining what might have been a poignant and uplifting tale about dreams realized and ruined. Dusted in inspirational dazzle though it may be, this self-serious film, like many of its characters, needed considerable improvement to make the cut.
