RETRO MOVIE REVIEW: FLASHDANCE

The grainy VHS memory I had from a childhood viewing of Flashdance could not hold a candle to what I saw on-screen as I attended the 40th anniversary celebration of Adrian Lyne’s sensual masterpiece.

Yes, the shots are heavy on erotica, but the scenes are so tasteful and artistically rendered every one of the scenes shot by Lyne would make the modern pornographic film look like an act of barbarism and whatever thot dancing for clicks on social media look like a complete fool.
Jennifer Beals was able to sell the fantasy of romance in the few hours she is on that screen dancing her heart out to pulses set by synth-God’s Giorgio Moroder and Philip Ramone. Penn state never looked so lively. Yes, on paper Hedley Jr. and Eszterhas’ script is a corny fantasy that would be sure to only serve to inspire the many sex workers of today thanks to the digital sexual revolution, but no amount of guests on Soft White Underbelly or viewings of Ice Cube struggling as an actor in The Player’s Club could illicit sympathy for sex as a business like Beals as Alex could.

Alex welds and smokes Marlboro’s, but she can suck the meat out of a lobster claw and take her bra off while wearing a sweater and tie all these contradictions together to make herself look like the definition of feminity. She’ll dance in a face mask like a kabuki, but paint her face like a clown to party. Dance ballet, but choose a pizza pie over a steak dinner; and even though she ends up becoming romantically involved with her boss, it’s hard to even be righteously upset because Beal’s Alex is just that flawless. In all respects, Alex is the epitome of the “girl next door” motif, but she cant be because she lives in a warehouse. Yeah, she goes to a confessional, throws rocks in jealous fits of rage and she doubts herself openly while settling for mediocrity all too often, but all that makes Alex that much more of an enigma. Real, but at the same time absolutely unbelivable.

The coy facial expressions of everyone that comes across her on-screen says it all. A front row seat just wasn’t enough; I would have been completely satisfied with my ticket purchase if Beals’ Alex could have rode that bike straight through the screen and into my seat, but Flashdance is no Last Action Hero.

The freeze-frame ending, the montages, the expert camerawork (handled by Donald Peterman) panning Beals’ body from head to toe in nearly every angle imaginable … celebrating the landmark anniversary of this film made me ashamed to be so desensitized from years of consuming what constitutes as today’s modern erotica, because I feel that no matter how close I sat to the screen I could never fully appreciate Jennifer Beals as the classic beauty that she is in Lyne’s timeless work of erotic art.

Score:
5/5