Ray Pride

Cruelty is something John Malkovich has always claimed to understand.

In his intently cinematic debut as a director in "The Dancer Upstairs," based on Nicholas Shakespeare's adaptation of his own sturdy novel, the legendary-to-some Steppenwolf actor does few of the things you'd expect from an actor-turned-director and most of the things you'd want from this complicated character.

First shown at Sundance 2002, "Dancer" is a forceful and persuasive variation on one of the most violent pre-Al Qaeda terrorist movements, Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), the 1980s Peruvian post-Maoist radical group, and the 1992 capture of Abimael Guzman, their messianic leader. Such cell-driven terrorist methods and procedures are now all-too-familiar to a larger world. The film was completed before September 11, 2001, and it's a tribute to Malkovich's intellectual curiosity and dramatic sophistication that "The Dancer Upstairs" continues to have so much to tell us about today's world, and about the decades of recent history that define our particular historical moment.

Malkovich was canny in his choice of collaborators. Start with Javier Bardem, playing corporate lawyer-turned-police investigator Augustin Rejas. He is honest, resolute, hoping to shift the course of the lightly fictionalized nation's history by believing the right thing can be done, somehow, someday, some way. (Malkovich calls it the "country of `don't know.'") Rejas' righteousness is the source of many jokes at his expense. "Do you have a delicate constitution, or what?" a general teases him. "Do you think you're a Gary Cooper type?" Rejas loves his young daughter; his wife is an unrelenting bourgeois who dreams of the perfect nose job, if only his profession allowed them the luxury. He's struck by Yolanda (Laura Morante), who teaches his daughter's ballet class. A bond begins, if not a love story. Bardem's quiet intensity, not quite smoldering, defines Rejas' dogged rectitude. (In the May issue of Interview, talking to Malkovich, Bardem puts it this way: "I'm some kind of obsessed freak. An actor either just shows up and acts, or he is an obsessed motherfucker. I am the second.")

Many things are not overtly flagged in "The Dancer Upstairs." The secrecy with which Yolanda and Rejas mask their potential adultery reflects, on one hand, the compartmentalization of their romantic intrigues, but also their own roles in the battle for the soul of their homeland. Malkovich is excellent at layering background details, such as when the streets are transformed into a different world after martial law is declared, much as this nation quickly became accustomed to the sight of armed soldiers in public places after 9/11.

While the Peruvian setting is blurred, local details are quietly, richly arrayed in this impressively smart film, approaching the unforced sophistication of Shakespeare's fine novel. An example: the use in the story of Sendero's exploitation of a belief held by the indigenous Ayacucho, that outsiders come to mountain villages to hack peasants to pieces and reduce their bodies to oil to lubricate the machines of the city. Costa-Gavras' "State of Siege" is quoted--Rejas is obsessed with a passage from the film--and the tone of the picture is also suggestive of other European filmmakers taken by the toll on personal life by political disorder, such as Volker Schlöndorff ("The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum") and Carlos Saura ("Cria Cuervos"). There are also a handful of smooth coups de theater--sudden, precise, telling visual images--that reflect Malkovich's experience as a stage director with Steppenwolf. Throughout, this is complex, worthy work, capturing the intensity and sorrow of living in interesting times with a quiet elegance and sophistication in its design, not showy but thoroughly thought through. And the story is beautiful and sad, the worldview exquisite and cosmopolitan, with characters whose most every grunt is a wearied epigram.

Jose Luis Alcaine, the gifted, now 65-year-old cinematographer who shot films for Bigas Lunas, for Almodovar, including "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," and particularly Victor Erice's nuanced masterpiece, "El Sur," begins at gloom, then deepens the film's palette beyond shadow to a cloacal darkness. A scene where research is done underneath reading lamps at a large library is sepulchral yet luminous, and the wordless ending is shatteringly direct and beautiful, told with visual fluency, binding two faces through undying love.

After a screening at Sundance 2002, Malkovich was terse, witty and circumspect about his working methods. (He was a little more loquacious in Sunday's New York Times Magazine cover profile.) Of the film's design, he noted only, "I'm particular about what people are wearing, particularly if I have to look at it for two months." And, drawing from his experience working with the stroke-afflicted Michelangelo Antonioni, said, "I think language can really be overrated as a tool for communication." The pictures tell that story, too.

"The Dancer Upstairs" opens Friday.

(2003-04-30)

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