“Bigger, better, bolder, back.” The quote by the Sunday Mirror’s Mark Adams prominently emblazoned across the top of the poster for StreetDance 2 3D pretty much tells you all you need to know about the sequel to the surprise hit of 2010, the UK underdog that came from nowhere to gleefully bash such bloated bombs as Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Prince of Persia (remember them?) at the box office upon its original theatrical release. Even more revealing is the appearance of the logo for the new BFI Film Fund in the opening credits. This is one of the first titles to receive its lottery funding via the BFI following the abolition of the UK Film Council on 31 March last year (see my original post on this) and, on the surface at least, appears to be pretty much the type of film we all thought David Cameron was crying out for just a few months back – a glossier reprise of a low-budget, high-earning film with mass popular appeal and high export potential. Ken Loach, this ain’t, but it’s a whole lot of fun, nonetheless.

Britain's Got Talent dance troupe Flawless return from the first film for this sequence in Trafalgar Square

Less a sequel than a reboot, the new film clearly has its eye on a bigger market than the UK. Largely eschewing the self-congratulatory back-slapping one would expect from a British film of this nature set in the year of the Olympics (although the London 2012 logo does appear once, in an early dance number set in Trafalgar Square), StreetDance 2 is essentially a tale of two cities, with much of the action ostensibly set in a Paris consisting of smoky bars and underground dance venues, and shabby youth hostel dormitories. There’s only a few choice exteriors to give an indication that even the smallest part of it was actually filmed there, while the vast arena that plays host to the spectacular final tournament is a dazzling, otherworldly CGI creation.

StreetDance 2 star and Will Young looky-likey Falk Hentschel

Not that the British side of things gets very much of a look in, with Nicola Burley’s sassy ‘Sarf’ London cru replaced wholesale by a pan-European posse led by clean-cut American Ash, played by newcomer (and dead ringer for Will Young) Falk Hentschel. Ash’s early-scene humiliation, after challenging London locals Invincible (curiously affecting American accents) to an underground dance-off, sees him ending up flat on his ass and assigned with the sobriquet ‘Popcorn boy’, as well as instilling in him a taste for revenge, fostered through a chance meeting with chirpy chappy Eddie (played by another Britain’s Got Talent alumni, the 2008 winner George Sampson), who offers to manage him. From then on in, it’s a brief hop, skip and jump around the continent as the unlikely pair attempt to put together a team to rescue Ash’s crumpled pride by taking on the arrogant rude boys at the world’s biggest dance competition, Final Clash, to be held in the French capital in but a matter of weeks. Before long the hapless duo are joined by, among others, Tino from Ibiza, Skorpion from the Swiss Alps, a tattooed lass from Amsterdam named Bam-Bam and Terrabyte from Prague, winding up in Paris where they discover the final missing ingredient in the shapely form of sultry salsa-dancing Eva (Sofia Boutella), all black fishnets and booty-shaking action.

Sofia Boutella, a revelation in three dimensions.

Eddie is the first to spot the pouty Parisienne’s potential to add a fiery touch of spice to the urban collective by introducing a more Latin groove to their routine. However, two obstacles stand between Ash’s will-to-power desire for revenge by way of such romantic fusion. The first, Eva’s current partner Lucien, is quickly eliminated, exiting the dance floor with a haughty Gallic shrug after being harangued because he has a girl’s name and his fandango is not quite ‘street’ enough. The second is her fiercely protective Uncle Manu, played by Tom Conti, reprising his Mediterranean shtick from Shirley Valentine (1989). Oh yes, and there’s a third – the chisel-jawed American’s unwillingness to share his moment.

StreetDance 2 lacks the charming naiveté of the first time round, but there’s a spontaneity about these films that makes them, if not hard to criticise, then at least hard to resist. The 3D format almost seems tailor made for its subject, far more so than the sort of macho action spectacles one usually associates it with. Bodies leap and contort rhythmically, in several instances eliciting uniform gasps of amazement from the audience at the screening I attended, while misty swathes of perspiration, dust motes and cigarette smoke accentuate the sense of volumetric space. The path to epic Final Clash might be a familiar one, but it’s exhilarating nonetheless.

Keeping it sexy in StreetDance 2

The portrayal of a new borderless and street-level, multi-ethnic Europe united in a harmonious body politic is also rather fascinating. This is one aimed at the EasyJet rather than the Eurorail generation, with barely a beret in sight, and Tom Conti’s gasping, garlic sausage-guzzling Uncle Manu left as the sole representative of the pre-single currency era. He’s not without a few wise words for the youngsters, too. “Dance with your heart, not with your head”, he advises our headstrong young hero or, translated into their street argot, “Don’t treat your bitch like a ho.” Manu’s role is to sandpaper down the competitive edge off the dancers, reminding them of the central role of passion in performance and exhorting them to temper their more aggressively sexy and confrontational stance with a bit of old-school romanticism – hence the running joke throughout the film of Eva consistently rebuffing Ash’s insistence they share the intimacy of dinner, despite spending hours of practice grinding their thighs together.

StreetDance 2: Beating the Eurovision Song Contest at its own game

The film’s initially conservative-seeming message, of a WASP-ish white boy from the U.S. coming in to rally together the disparate elements of a fragmented Europe with the aid of his British sidekick and lead them unto victory, is turned on its head by the finale. In a film in which the line between text and subtext often seems to strain beneath its gossamer flimsiness, it’s possible to detect a slightly more radical idea, as the pushy outsider effectively learns to subjugate his ego for the good of the collective – in other words, to become more instinctive, and indeed, more European. Now I wonder what David Cameron would make of that?

StreetDance 2 is out in the UK in 2D and 3D on 30 March 2012. For more information, check out the films website www.streetdancethemovie.co.uk.

Posted at 12:39 on 21 March 2012 Filed under news.

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I was just in the middle of my last post about Fritz Lang when a rather surprise bit of news came my way, namely that our new(ish) Conservative-LibDem Alliance government are scrapping the UK Film Council, established in 2000 by the Labour government to develop and promote the British film industry. You can read more about this on the BBC website, which quotes Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt as saying he wanted to establish a “direct and less bureaucratic relationship with the British Film Institute” and UK Film Council chairman Tim Bevan calling it “a bad decision”.

What will this mean, I wonder? Well, there’s a few issues surrounding this. I’m no Tory apologist, believe me, but after the complete mess our last government left this country’s finances in, it’s clear that a bit of streamlining was in order. There’s been spending cuts across the board, as we knew there would be whoever was in government, and most from far more significant areas than the arts – notably in areas such as the health service. The UK Film Council’s £15m budget to invest in British films is best considered a drop in the ocean compared with the cuts that will be made elsewhere, but one wonders to what extent it will effect the UK film industry.

There are several issues worth discussing here. Firstly, to what extent should the population of a country be expected to support the concept of “a national cinema” through money that its government could be spending elsewhere? The hardline argument is that cinema is a commercial industry, and like all arts, if it has to be supported from outside, then how relevant is it to the general public? Should cinema be considered an art or an industry, should films only be considered successful if they make a profit, and does the success of Film Council-backed titles have indirect economic effects by promoting British culture overseas?

The other point is that where else are British filmmakers expected to raise money?

But what seems to be more the case is that it is not the film funding that is being axed but the layers of bureaucracy that decide how it gets allocated – exceedingly well paid bureaucracy too, compared to the actual creative agents involved in directly making the films. The UK Film Council was very good at promoting a certain type of British film, but its critics were keen to point out that it didn’t really encourage much in the way of spontaneity and experimentation.

Last year in the July 2009 issue of Sight and Sound magazine, a number of British filmmakers forced overseas to look for financing for their projects voiced their criticisms of the Film Council, few more vocally than Soi Cowboy director Thomas Clay:

“With Soi Cowboy we reached a DVD cut of the film for 75,000 Euros, and with that we submitted the film to Cannes last year and were invited. But we didn’t have the money to get the print and finish the film, so it seemed like a natural moment to go to the UK Film Council’s Completion Fund. [It didn't work out.] A month after Cannes, in June 2008, the UKFC said they wanted to be involved in my next film. I met Lenny Crooks [head of the UKFC's New Cinema Fund] and it seemed very positive, but after that- a complete disappearance, Crooks refused to take any of our calls or emails.My overall feeling towards the UKFC is that their policy of ‘creative partnership’ – of extensive, often fruitless, development periods, executive supervision, multiple editors and withholding final cut from the director- is not conducive to a culture of serious arthouse cinema in the UK. It is scandalous that these civil servants are paid six-figure salaries out of the public purse to sit around and not give money to Terence Davies, myself and others; to drag a director as eminent as Nicolas Roeg through years of development, resulting in a homogenised product. Serious UK cinema would be much better served by the creation of a separate entity – most simply, the reinstatement of the BFI Production Board – that awards smaller amounts of money in exchange for greater creative freedom, on the basis of proven merit and international profile, as opposed to ideological ‘correctness’ and deluded commercial concerns.”

There are many countries’ film industries that do not have the luxury of funding and assistance from government agencies such as this. One might argue that these are not as strong as the British film industry, although one only has to look at the case of Japan for a dynamic film culture that is not in any way State funded. But what I wonder is whether in the economic climate Britain finds itself in at the moment, will our cinema be able to find adequate funding from private sources, or will it revert to the same impoverished situation it found itself in under the last Tory government, when in the early-1990s one could have been forgiven for assuming that British cinema was dead and gone forever?

Posted at 16:22 on 26 July 2010 Filed under news.

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• Soi Cowboy
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