After three hours of this dance drama’ I looked at my watch 10 minutes had gone by. Never has an 80-minute running time seemed so interminable.
It’s essentially a two-hander. A wet drip of a woman with doe eyes wanders around the underground in a daze. Coming out of Camden Tube station a man going the other way spots her, catches up with her and asks her out for a drink. Any woman in her right mind would shout for the police, especially in Camden, but she agrees.
He, Oriel, is a sexy Cuban dancer, with irritating wooden necklaces and stupid hair, and is convinced he has seen her dancing somewhere. She calls herself Maya’ but is clearly hiding something, and claims she has never danced.
Undeterred he ploughs on, buys her a drink in a Cuban bar, then takes her to Sadlers Wells to watch a dance performance from the side of the stage. Maya seems transformed well, she raises an eyebrow, which is about as animated as she gets. At the after-show party an agent seems to recognise Maya but she still insists she is not a dancer and storms out.
Oriel then pulls out his final card, by improvising a dance underneath London Bridge train station, without any passers by punching him or pouring beer over him strange. Maya seems to be finally won over, but as they get intimate she reveals some of her secret past life to him.
It’s clearly made on a low budget Camden High Street is dry in one shot, then rain-soaked, then dry again, but all that can be forgiven for a decent script and some sparky acting. This has neither. The dialogue is wooden and pretentious, it takes an age for anyone to say anything and when they do it’s stiff and uninvolving. The acting is just plain bad Vargas is clearly supposed to be a sexy stud but just looks like an overfed student with a smelly flat, and Jourdain is just dreadful. She barely changes her mournful pout throughout the film, and wanders about looking like a member of the Royal Family who has drunk her fortune.
Overall verdict: It’s a vacuous waste of 80 minutes, and frankly confirms my suspicions about this modern dance lark it’s idiotic bullshit.
Reviewer: Mike Martin