Dan Fry | Dancing Around / 2017

forget what you’ve heard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Fry (screenwriter and director) Dancing Around / 2017 [15 minutes]

 

In Australian filmmaker Dan Fry’s 2017 short film, Dancing Around, he explores a family breakup due to a mid-life gay relationship through the daughter, Maddy’s (Taylor Morgan) eyes.

      Maddy’s mother Ned (Nereda Taylor) is a lawyer who daily drives to work from the family’s Queensland country home with her co-worker Johan (Johan Venter), while her husband, Dan (played by the director) appears to be a stay-at-home father. Certainly, it appears that he has the closest relationship to Maddy, encouraging her dancing, insisting she help out with kitchen duties, and indicating other attentions that evidences the fact that it has become mostly his responsibility to raise Maddy.

     But there are subtle signs, early on in this film, that things are not as perfect in this family as they first may seem. Maddy seems to be spending in an inordinate amount of time dancing; indeed Ned and Dan have even built her a small separate studio for her to get away from all other human contact, which she apparently takes every opportunity to do. Later, we learn that there have been regular arguments between the two adults, several of which she has overheard.

        Although she seems to like Ned’s law partner Johan, a visit from him on this particular occasion does not elicit joy. Maddy complains that all her mother and he talk about is law. But we suspect there are also other reasons. And when he arrives, we soon begin to wonder—when after dinner, Dan excuses himself from his wife’s company in order to take a walk, inquiring beforehand whether or not Maddy is in her room, and we observe Johan soon after exiting from what appears to be his room during his stay—what else is behind Maddy’s displeasure in Johan’s evidently commonplace visit.

      Fortunately, Fry postpones the scene, narratively returning to a scene somewhat earlier, evidently after dinner with the adult trio, when Maddy is asked to dance. But even before she is requested to perform by her father, we see a slight argument erupt as Ned seems to wonder whether her performance is worth watching, while Dan appears to scold her for not ever being there to see her work. Johan quickly resolves the devolving argument by asking to see her dance, her father reminding Maddy to “Forget what you might have heard, this is your time to shine.” The child dances a free-form series of movements that is quite remarkable.

     The director narratively moves the film yet a little further back, during a scene while they are all at dinner, Maddy stabbing at her fruit which she clearly is not interested in eating. She drops a piece of fruit on the floor and bends down to pick up, observing under the table that her father and Johan are holding hands. We see her break down in tears soon after.

   

     We now return to the scene that was interrupted earlier, where the two men meet and kiss a ways off from the house, but alas not far enough away from Maddy’s young eyes, as she stands on the balcony of the home, we later discover, photographing them. Clearly, Maddy is a kind of later version of Henry James' Maisie, of that novelist's What Maisie Knew.

     By the time the men return from their tryst, Maddy has shown the pictures to her mother. And when they return it is with the intention of finally revealing the truth to Ned about their relationship. She, however, bluntly faces off with her recent discovery, which obviously doesn’t end well.

      Dan is seen packing up, the two males obviously heading off, but Dan trying to make certain that Ned will remind Maddy, who apparently now refuses to talk with him, that he will be back with her in a couple of days. The bitter Ned reports that Maddy was not truly is daughter, a statement overheard evidently by Maddy. Johan insists that Dan go up to talk to Maddy as the film comes to a close; Maddy in her room alone, two pet hamsters upon her shoulders, takes down the photos of her father and mother to study them carefully as if she seeking in them some forgotten reality. The work ends with clips of film taken from when Maddy was a baby being carried, hugged, and kissed by her father, no mother in sight.

       The tragedy in this painful tale of late coming out—a common occurrence alas in societies, such as Fry argues Queensland is, where men and women are still encouraged to hide their sexual identities—is the pain it brings to Maddy who has already pulled apart from the human world as she puts all of her confused feelings into dance. Maddy may lose her greatest source of love, it appears, if her father is refused visiting privileges or if he is refused his parental care for her. The mother clearly has been far too busy to properly demonstrate her love for her daughter. And yet through her final statement we realize she is making a case for Dan to have no rights concerning his beloved daughter.

       In this sense the film represents a brutal reality that occurs in homophobic worlds in which individuals are forced to escape, like Maddy has into dance, into cocoons spun with lies and dishonesty.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).