DIFF26 | Dance With Me | Dir: Romanuse Langa (2025) | 79 min
SC5 | Fri 24 Jul | 5pm
Dance With Me hits all the story beats but does not convincingly portray a universe with an interior life. The world feels inhabited. The cinematography is excellent. The premise is solid, a new take on the disgruntled teenager finding herself, this time through gumboot dancing. But the staging is uniformly awkward. Many of the plot points arrive without any sort of dramatic logic. The film happens because the script is written.
The film seems motivated not by the character's journey, but by the idea of making a coming of age film about gumboot dancing. Sped up drone shots, social media posts on screen, an entire internal awakening transmitted through watching the main character watch a Facebook reel. Scenes unfold without any earned momentum.
By the thirty minute mark the awkward collision of Karate Kid and rom-com jars so that even thin disbelief becomes hard to maintain. The music broadcasts the desired gestalt the director hopes the audience receives, the self-aware camera moves, the script that tells not shows, and the performances that read as performances, all combine into a whole less than the sum of its parts.
A troubled family life, a desire to get more from life, a past moment of trauma, a young trainer and an old trainer battling over who gets to run the community hall, a flamboyant but demanding choreographer, montage training sequences, a father who gives good gumboot advice, a moment where she might not make it, has to dig deep, a pensive moment on the beach, the two trainers reconciling, trauma memories almost derailing the final dance, triumph, cheers, credits roll. Things happen not as consequences of actions or beliefs, but because someone thought this is what normally happens next.
Often the cast resort to soap opera style acting, and the script makes it hard for any other interpretation, but Minenhle Sithole acquits herself against the material and achieves moments where she inhabits the role. While the staging is often rote, the locations are the film's authentic character. The central idea is solid, but not fully explored. The unfolding of the trauma, while an obvious plot point, is sensitively handled. And there are true moments of chemistry in among all of it. It is not without promise, it is just not fully realised.
Dance With Me shouldn't be in competition. It should be in a classroom, or a rough-cut lab, or a mentor's inbox with a gentle note attached. That it's here, in competition at an international festival, tells me more about the festival than it does about the film.
Dance With Me is a learning experience. A young person finds a positive community activity. But the filmmaker never quite comes of age.
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