Final Rating 4/5
With her narrative feature debut Fancy Dance, director Erica Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise craft a pointed story that depicts the effects of broad societal indifference on Indigenous populations. Centred around the coming-of-age of a young Seneca-Cayuga girl on a road trip with her aunt, Fancy Dance deftly weaves in themes of cultural assimilation, missing and murdered indigenous women, and apathy towards crime against Native Americans.
After the disappearance of her sister, Jax Goodiron (Lily Gladstone) takes care of her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), helping her to prepare for an upcoming powwow in Oklahoma City. At the same time, Jax distributes flyers and pursues every lead she can to find her sister. After Roki is sent by Child Protective Services to live with her white, culturally unaware grandparents (played by Shea Whigham and Audrey Wasilewski), Jax sneaks her away to take her to the powwow where she has promised Roki would be reunited with her mother.
Fancy Dance regularly points out the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Indigenous people are treated as second-class citizens. When an Indigenous woman goes missing, no serious effort is made to find her. When a native child is taken from a white family by her native aunt, it only takes hours for an Amber Alert to be called. Life on the reservation with her aunt is deemed an unsafe environment for Roki by the state, who instead passes the girl to a man she barely knows and his wife who she has never met. In the most damning one-two punch in the film, Roki’s grandmother buys her ballet shoes so she can “learn a different kind of dance” to make up for not being able to attend the powwow, only minutes later telling her husband that “she’ll never bond with us unless we get that craziness out of her life.”
While the world around her casually erases Indigenous culture, Roki strongly embraces her heritage. The powwow is important to Roki not only because of its meaning to her relationship with her mother, but also because of the togetherness the tradition represents. Despite being “kidnapped”, Roki takes an active role in her trip to Oklahoma City, helping Jax to steal from and outsmart authorities at every stop.
Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain provides a sparse score for Fancy Dance, deliberately deployed to heighten the tension during key moments. A scene with reservation sheriff JJ (Ryan Begay) alone in a junkyard looking for a missing woman is accompanied by soft vocalization that’s equal parts eery and soothing, complementing Begay’s performance to put JJ’s internality on full display. Jax and Roki running through a field to hide from the police is punctuated by a steady drumbeat over a light drone, making Jax’s fear of losing Roki feel authentically complex.
Deroy-Olson and Gladstone excel as co-leads with brilliant on-screen chemistry. The supporting cast is excellent as well, with Wasilewski and Begay in particular standing out in their roles.
With Fancy Dance, Tremblay takes the familiar framing of a road-trip movie and builds a layered film that’s far more than the sum of its parts. The writing communicates a culture at odds with the world around it through no fault of its own, while the performances draw out the frustration of living in a society that refuses to care.
Fancy Dance was seen during the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival.
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