By Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/12/23 – Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance was selected at the U.S. Centerpiece for this year’s Outfest Los Angeles. It is a moving family drama about community, sisterhood, and Native identity. Lily Gladstone gives a great performance as Jax, a queer Native woman scraping by as best she can while struggling to keep her family together. As the film opens, Jax (Gladstone) and her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) are in the midst of their daily routine at the Seneca Cayuga Reservation. That routine is actually one of hustling strangers out of their car keys. Jax is just trying to make ends meet and provide for her loved one as they search for Roki’s missing mother. As the 13-year-old prepares for a mother-daughter show at a powwow, Jax pushes the authorities and her father (played by Shea Whigham) to do something to find her sister. As the system continues to fail them, Jax and Roki are forced to flee and seek some sort of justice on their own.
Director Erica Tremblay, who co-wrote the screenplay with Miciana Alise, creates an emotionally engaging portrait of the struggles of life on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma. Two great performances give the movie a rich poignancy, thanks to Lily Gladstone as Jax and Isabel Deroy-Olson as young Roki. In the opening sequence, Tremblay immediately illustrates a cheeky ability to show both the traditional and criminal side of native life. It begins with some scenic footage along the river, with Jax telling Roki some tips for living off the land. But when they spot a white man fishing, they don’t miss a beat in silently executing a plan to steal from his truck. A tough, resourceful lesbian, Jax encourages Roki to steal, demonstrating a slick trick at the gas station where she switches hoses, allowing an unsuspecting stranger to fill her tank.
Before she vanished, Roki’s mom worked as a stripper and sold drugs to a group of bad-news roughnecks, but we get no flashbacks to the kind of mother she was. The dialogue suggests this isn’t the first time she has disappeared. In her absence, Roki needs a strong mother figure, and Jax is the best option she’s got. In the Cayuga tongue, the word “aunt” means “little mother,” we learn, but for Jax to merit the responsibility that title implies, she’ll need to stay out of jail herself – and the system certainly seems stacked against her.
Though Roki fervently hopes her mother will appear at the annual powwow to dance with her, Jax must deal with the very real possibility that Tawi has been taken from them for good, and that she will lose Roki to child protective services. Life without hope is meaningless, which is something that Fancy Dance understands all too well but hope without action is just as damaging. When Jax’s father Frank (played with understated authority by Shea Whigham) comes into the picture, having been granted custody of his estranged granddaughter alongside his new wife, his fumbling attempts to connect with Roki highlight how ineffective empty words are when the speaker has made no move to help. The broken relationship between Jax and Frank is also given its due, making the film as much of a family drama as it is a statement on the failures of modern society.
Eric Tremblay has written for popular television shows with native American leads like Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs. She follows similar themes here, focusing on the ways in which the infrastructure of government and law enforcement alike have alienated and abandoned Native women in their times of need. She allows Jax to let young Roki continue to believe that her mother Tawi will appear at any moment. There is not as much dancing as the title would imply, but Fancy Dance uses the upcoming powwow as a symbol of hope that never dies. Roki awaits the grand occasion because it represents her chance to see her mother again.
The main characters all live on the reservation and feel powerless to stop their friends and family from disappearing. Indigenous women in the USA disproportionately go missing and become murder victims. There are no government agents to be the white main characters, because no government agents come to help. Jax carries around a missing flier with her sister’s picture on it, and posts copies around town, but when she asks for an update from law enforcement, it’s clear that no one is investigating her sister at all. It’s out of the reservation law enforcement’s jurisdiction, even though Jax’s brother (Ryan Begay) is the chief of police, and the FBI’s only resource is a tip line people can call. Fancy Dance captures the grief of Jax and Roki with a loss that will have no closure. More deeply, it captures the grief of a community that experiences this type of loss all too often.
Fancy Dance screens at the Directors Guild of America, Theatre 1, on Saturday, July 15, at 7:15 PM. The film can also be viewed online through Outfest Streaming, beginning July 17 through July 23. For tickets, go to www.outfest.org