This was a beautiful story of coping with loss, never giving up on your dreams, and living life to the fullest. Is it the most thought out script? No. But it will make you smile and was a super fun addition to my date night.
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adrian-monsivais9 June 2021
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Ok, so, it's got every cliche in the book, but this is a movie made with a terrific cast and with so much heart. I was thoroughly entertained and moved especially by the very unaffected performance of Molly Nutley and. That heartbreaking scene when she pours her heart out to her landlady and her tears come so easily and convincingly. The rating so far really deserves much better and I'm sure as it gets more widely seen it will rise.
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Rrrobert16 December 2021Good cast, decent acting and good production values.
However, the story is a mess and makes no sense. In several slow and repetitive scenes we learn that the small-town main character Dylan mourns her deceased dancer mother and reluctantly goes to the city to audition for a dance troupe at the urging of grandma. Grandma got the month wrong (Dylan at no point having googled the auditions for exact dates, times, addresses, and other required info) but the cleaner at the reception area needs someone to fill in so offers Dylan a job as a cleaner at a nightclub where she can watch and learn from drag queens rehearsing. For some weird reason Dylan takes this cleaner job and tells her family the auditions are proceeding. On arriving for her first shift the frustrated choreographer Victor instantly decides he needs someone to help him imagine the moves so asks Dylan to pose on stage for him - where she reveals she is a dancer. What? Victor is a dancer/choreographer but knows no other dancer he can call on? Victor quickly decides the show needs Dylan and the very petite and feminine Dylan, who knows nothing about drag or gay men, spends 10 minutes making herself over into a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, in an underdeveloped Victor/Victoria reworking.
The constant hair over the face, back-to-camera, abrupt editing of Dylan's dance routines is to hide the dance double but is very distracting and ruins the dance scenes.
I am not sure how Dylan saved the show. There is a cool routine where each drag performer does a solo bit then Dylan arrives for her bit. But each performer was great on their own and Dylan didn't suddenly teach them those miming, hair, makeup, costume, dance and drag skills. They clearly were all pretty good performers already.
The drag queens convince Dylan to return to the show but then she's cast in a different show with the drag queens watching the rehearsal of it, while a dubbed in line helpfully suggests Dylan can do both shows.
Aside from that there are many ideas hinted at but only lightly explored, and the story leaves many loose ends.
Research: Dame Edna is not a drag queen but a character who happens to be a woman, conceived in 1956 and performed by Australian-born comedian Barry Humphries. Humphries moved to London in 1959. Starting in 1969 his character Edna appeared in London stage shows and later did UK TV shows, and later US and Australian stage tours, TV and movies. Edna did not do "drag" mime and dance performances as such. Edna's appearances were winding down by 2013. Victor says he and Dylan worked with Dame Edna doing drag shows "in Australia". The story, location, timelines make no sense, yet the drag queens and Victor's partner all believe it and are impressed by it. -
sergepesic8 August 2022There is a certain comfort in predictability. Especially in a feel-good movie. First, one has to be in a mood to play along, second suspending one's belief is an absolute necessity and third, embrace the obvious, no matter how implausible. All of this would help if you were watching this movie. I did and it helped, immensely.
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This movie rips off moments from "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," "Carla and Connie," "In and Out," not to mention channeling John Waters' Divine. It is essentially a messy, unbelievable joke -- although sometimes a very funny one.
A fairly unremarkable young woman "Dylan," whose mother died 1.5 years ago (and who has still not come to terms with it), works with her depressed father and her repressed friend on some small island in Sweden. Although Dylan (apparently named for "Bob Dylan") thinks of herself as a dancer, she only (apparently) learned how to do some form of disco dancing from her late, beloved mother, who loved John Travolta.
Her grandmother learns of an audition for a major dance company and basically sends Dylan off to the mainland. Dylan arrives, for what I imagine would have been only 1 night, and in short order learns that the "audition" was being held at a club that offers drag queen shows. This is incomprehensible. Next, she learns that she's a month late for the audition because even though Grandma seems quite alert, Grandma apparently can't distinguish one month from another. So, since Dylan has nothing else to do, she decides to go home. But wait... a cleaning lady at the club entices Dylan to stay for one week so that she can go meet some guy she met on an app. Dylan will have to clean the club for a week, but, she can have the thrill of watching a group of extremely untalented, bitchy "drag queens" put together their act under the supervision of a choreographer and director who are in a volatile (gay) relationship.
This implausible set-up soon expands to create a situation where Dylan must pretend to be a drag queen so that she can "join" the team of "dancing queens." Why she would want to do this is beyond my understanding. But that's what she does. Because she joins this rag-tag group of mismatched dancers who look like they were rejected for bit parts in "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," her presence alone apparently brings the "Queens" a level of respectability they never had before and she "saves" the club.
Soon enough Dylan's old buddy shows up unannounced. Though he tries (in the beginning) to make a drunken pass at Dylan, we soon realize (as does he) that he is actually gay. He accidentally outs her to the rest of the queens (as if anyone couldn't have seen or understood that she was a woman when she wasn't in drag). This sets off a series of angry arguments and she returns, a failed queen, to her little island. Later, the queens en masse decide to descend on said island and coax her back, because they "need" her.
This, though, somehow morphs into Dylan auditioning for the major dance company where, surprise, the choreographer from the volatile relationship is a key dancer. When she rightly asked him, "Why didn't you tell me?" he says my most-hated line of dialogue of all time, "You never asked me."
Then, because this movie lives in a parallel universe, one of the female dancers has fallen ill and Dylan, based on the choreographer's good word, steps into her shoes and becomes the dancer she always wanted to be -- despite admitting to the choreographer that the only kind of dancing she could do was disco dancing.
Everyone essentially pairs off with whoever doesn't have anyone, and we get the sense that in Dylan's spare time, she will join the queens on stage as an honorary queen, giving their show the life it never had before.
That is the movie. It is completely unbelievable. The set-ups don't work and I couldn't buy a single one.
The acting is uniformly flat or over-the-top.
The young actress who plays Dylan has a limited number of facial expressions, which she overuses to the point where you want to shout at her, "Take some acting lessons!" Also, she never seems to show any level of true excitement. Despite what she ends up achieving, she is always very low-key and I'd say borderline depressed. Yes, she was supposed to be depressed, but it's hard to cheer for someone who doesn't take control of the vehicle. She kind of just let things happen to her. "Sometimes you don't always get what you want in life," she shares with the choreographer. And I thought, "Especially when you don't put any effort into living."
There were a few hysterically funny moments, mostly coming from the "main drag queen," Tommy La Diva (Claes Malmberg) -- who kept looking like he was going to keel over dead from a heart attack.
The other thing that must be considered: I wonder if this was based on a screenplay written 20 years ago. We are asked to believe that a woman who died in her early 40s taught her daughter how to do disco dancing because she loved John Travolta. It's possible that she loved John, but John's disco heyday was in the 70s and the woman in question might have only been 5 years old. I don't believe that she would have grown up loving disco music, although it's not impossible.
Perhaps in Sweden, this will be a big hit as some of the actors will be well known. But other than a few picturesque moments and few laughs, the whole scenario didn't work and was done better in the aforementioned movies.
One other thing, "Tommy" kept on insisting that they do "I Will Survive" because it was something that he already knew and had costumes for and could dance to. But everyone else kept calling it "cheesy." This is so stupid and wrong and an insult to probably the best disco song of all time, other than "Last Dance." There is nothing "cheesy" about the song. And despite the endless arguments about whether to use "I Will Survive" or not, it ends up being used at least three times, and it's clear, if it isn't already, that you would have to be dead not shake your groove thing when you heard the music.
If you have absolutely nothing to do and are bedridden, you might consider turning it on. You might pass out several times, but when you awake you will have missed nothing, since the "dialogue" continues to rehash several of the same points over and over and over.
If they had really wanted to do something unique, they would have let the young girl choreograph the show -- that's what I thought they were going to do. If she had stumbled into that position and transformed the drab, tired act of jaded old queens, this might have been a movie worth rooting for. Instead, it mostly fails on all possible fronts. -
This has it's heart in the right place but the plot is a mess. Sweden still has a way to go to reach nuanced GLBTQI story telling but baby dance steps are heading in the right direction.
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thunbladmats6 June 202120 minutes and the acting is terrible, scipt anyone? Soft music tries to compensate a really bad movie. Save your time and watch someting els.
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starstuf-0111211 June 2021The story was sweet and funny...life!! The modern dance scenes...beautiful! Such talented performers throughout! At my age...rarely am I pleasantly surprised by a film! Thank you so much!!! Laurabell.
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Films from Scandinavia are kind of anti-Hollywood. The naturalism in the play, the clarity of the dialogue contrasts with the completely over-the-top play and chatter in US comedies. However, Dancing Queens shows that the result is not necessarily better. Especially when one tries to lump too many things together, so that the result is a tired stew that burbles along and has the appeal of a politically correct TV film. Unfortunately, this is the case with many Netflix productions and here, too, it is probably not only a rather small budget that is to blame for the fact that some things don't work. All the characters in the film are charming and likeable, that's for sure. A few of them are believable and only Molly Nutley in the lead role is really good. The drag queens seem like a very tired rehash of Ru Paul's Drag Race and actually the whole story is very far-fetched. The dance scenes develop zero dynamics, are cut hectically and don't really bring any momentum into this tired joint either.
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holtesdiana19 June 2021Cringe delux, bad acting and no flow in the dance parts...
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wojtekmaruniak29 June 2021One of the weakest Swedish movies I have seen, but under the aegis of Netflix, everything can be spoiled.
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soyjuanfernandez19 June 2021Progressive International makes a movie, and it's quite boring... Don't waste your time...
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pourovajirina12 June 2021I think this movie deserves better!! I really enjoyed it and I loved the storyline! The actors weren't bad at all! Really don't get all those negative reviews!
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alexglimmark10 February 2023The movie is about a young woman named Dylan who's dreaming of following in her mother's footsteps and becoming a dancer, but following her mother's death, Dylan's life is on halt. Through a series of events (that are uninteresting, but comes down to mostly favourable coincidences and luck), Dylan ends up as the new member of a drag show. However, everyone thinks Dylan is a guy and she has to pretend to be one, or she'll be kicked off the show.
The marketing of the movie gives you the impression that this movie is about a grieving young woman who enters the warm and accepting queer world through the art form of drag. She's given a chance to fulfil her dream of becoming a dancer while helping a group of drag queens keep their show alive. Both Dylan and the star of the drag show, Tommy La Diva, have lost someone they love, and the drag show helps them with their grief, as both of their loved ones were dancers/performers.
It's a beautiful story that could have shown how many LGBTQ+ individuals often are shunned by their biological families due to a lack of acceptance and instead finds a chosen family that loves them for who they are. Dylan wasn't abandoned by her family, but following the loss of her mother, her grief seems to have disconnected her from the family that she still has. Having her enter the queer world and allowing her to see grief and pain be turned into powerful art would have been an effective story. But instead, the story forces all of their queer characters to take a step back in favour of a straight love story between Dylan and the (presumably bisexual) choreographer Victor. A movie that's seemingly determined to portray itself as a celebration of queer culture, decides to focus much of its runtime on embracing the movie industry's heteronormative ideas of what love is supposed to look like and what type of love is allowed to be given space in the media. Rendering most, if not all, of the queer characters quite useless in the story.
Side note: Despite being a movie that wants to portray a part of queer culture, most of the cast are heterosexual, even though, there are plenty of queer actors in Sweden... -
godin_al25 February 2024I will say, the MFC is such a mediocre terrible dancer. They hype this girl up as if she's so great but her dancing is like some basic b*** from a club. I'll say that the other drag queens had more sparkle than she did. I kept waiting for some actual dance skill to come out, but was left waiting.
This could have been so much more captivating if she had even a modicum of actual dance skill. Check out some Drag Race and such...you'll see some real talent.
Plus, the male character female character dynamic is a little over dramatic. Lol. It was so so. I think it had potential but for goodness sake, get an actual dancer in there! -
godin_al25 February 2024Most of the way through the movie, I'm left wondering why the heck is the MFC considered even remotely good at dancing? Practically the entire movie she's just a basic b*** with some club style dancing. Not even at all impressive. The drag queens, who supposedly need rescuing have more sparkle than the MFC. I mean, come on! Watch some Drag Race or something! They have more talent than this character casting!
But toward the end, they finally at least showed that the MFC can dance a little. But only at the very very end. Even then, it was...ok. This could have been so much better than it was if they just casted a better dancer! I love drag stuff but this story needed elevated a bit more. Also, the dynamic between the MFC and mmc was a little odd. Still wasn't sure what all was happening there. -
arfdawg-116 April 2024How does anyone give this a rave review? It is literally a horrible movie and anyone who tries to tell you anything different is lying and pushing an agenda. As usual.
The movie is basically another one of those endless men in dresses movies that companies are forced to make in order to get their scores up. This one has a bit of a twist.
The main character is actually a real woman who has to retend to be a man pretending to be a woman or she will get fired from the drag show she's in.
But why does she want to be in it? If she was such a great dancer couldn't she make it honestly?
Only she's a horrible dancer.
And the movie is really sub par on every level. Bad acting, really bad directing too. Whose idea was it to make the movie so dark that you can barely see the characters through maybe 45 percent of the movie!
Stay away. -
hesterroozeboom5 June 2021It's a lovely story with beautiful dancing. Fun characters and great acting. All you need to know..
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The cast is absolutely perfect and the story is not simplistic. Instead, it leaves many loose ends, which I appreciate. The actress who plays the main character is simply studendous. There is no way to avoid smiling as the story takes you to a place of acceptance of who you are (and who everyone around is) and what you want. From there, obviously, there is a whole lot of light because when you accept yourself completely, you just glow!
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gazzoo-2677419 June 2021Very nice movie, in some parts the transition between scenes doesn't make any sense, but the actors are good, and the scenery of the town is outstanding. It is cheesy but good cheesy. Really enjoyed the movie.
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emmanuellebarone18 June 2021What a surprise with this movie! It is a little gem, wonderful acting, funny and human, beautiful dancing sequences too.
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clarringtonvandy-858446 July 2021A great film! Really uplifting and kind, a lovely story that I greatly enjoyed!
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macbell20123 June 2021Different type of movie but very refreshing and entertaining.
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As the title says. I felt completely moved by this and the main character's acting was amazing. The music was fantastic even though I didn't know some of it and it was modern. Such a feel good film with a great message. If you enjoyed 'Mamma Mia!' you will love this!
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Diane104817 August 2021My go to movie when I want to feel good!
The attraction between Dylan and Victor, the main characters was palpable from the first time they set eyes on each other and then danced together #chemistry #eyecontact #handtouching #bodycontact
Victor the ambitious young choreographer has been in a gay relationship for 6 years with a much older man who discovered him at 18 years of age and he feels beholden to him. Dylan comes along and She is a very talented girl dancer masquerading as a Drag Queen and Hijinks follows as they innocently flirt with each other adoringly all through the film. We need to have a sequel to see how their relationship develops or not.
The whole cast is fabulous - I loved all the dancing, all the side relationships in this Drag Queen culture film. This is a keeper of a movie to watch from time to time to cheer you up.