Dancing At The Blue Iguana Review

• 14th Jul 2011

Believe it or not, Dancing At The Blue Iguana is not just a film about naked girls spinning around poles and does actually carry quite a good story line. Don’t put it on thinking you’re going to get wall to wall naked girls, like in Showgirls, because you’ll be sorely mistaken. The two films may be based in the same setting but Dancing At The Blue Iguana is much more real, dramatic and a downright better film.

It follows the personal lives of five exotic dancers and Eddie, the manager of a strip club in suburban California known as the Blue Iguana. The basis of the characters of the dancers is about as cliché as you can imagine; Stormy (Sheila Kelley) is an attractive, thick-skinned cynic who is starting to realise her days as a dancer may be numbered. Jo (Jennifer Tilly) likes to think of herself as the Blue Iguana’s star attraction, but has just discovered she’s pregnant. Angel (Daryl Hannah) is sweet and naive and tries to deal with her fear of being unloved by adopting a child. Jasmine (Sandra Oh) is an aspiring poet and is trying not to get settled into a career as a stripper, while being encouraged in her writing by coffeehouse owner Dennis (Chris Hogan), who features spoken word performers. And Jesse (Charlotte Ayanna), the youngest of the performers, is lacking in self-belief and has a desperate need for approval which manifests in her desire to please the customers.

This film was director, Michael Radford’s first American feature and, rather surprisingly based on the quality of the dialogue, the script and the characters in the film grew out of an improvisational workshop that Radford conducted with his lead actors. They were each asked to research their characters and come up with a storyline for them. Remarkably, the improvised acting in the film sounds polished and believable, giving the film a raw, almost edgy quality. The actors, for the most part, create interesting and sympathetic characters despite them falling into predictable stereotypes. The girls that work at The Blue Iguana are strippers, but they’re people, too and just like the rest of us, they seek true love, but are often left disappointed, and they have hopes and ambitions, which they often do not follow through.

As much as I love Showgirls, Dancing At The Blue Iguana completely outclasses it as a film. Showgirls relies too heavily on the wall to wall naked girls to try and keep your attention, even if it does have Jessie from Saved By The Bell in it, but Dancing At The Blue Iguana kind of makes you want to skip through those bits to get to the next part of the story. If you want to see a film that neatly ties up all its loose ends in the last twenty minutes, you’ll be left wanting with this but it did remind me of a lovely point I read in a Roger Ebert review of Sid and Nancy a while back that said “If a movie can illuminate the lives of other people who share this planet with us and show us not only how different they are but, how even so, they share the same dreams and hurts, then it deserves to be called great.” Based on this statement then, I would definitely say Dancing At The Blue Iguana is a great film.

Laura Johnson