TV Reviews : ‘French Dance’: Swinging in Cajun Country

Cajun culture entered the ‘80s American mainstream via a brief culinary craze, but there’s more than food to “French Dance Tonight” (airing at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28). The hourlong documentary is an absorbing look at Louisiana’s Cajun and zydeco music scene that gives a palpable sense of a people and a place.

Crucially, filmmakers Les Blank, Chris Strachwitz and Maureen Gosling didn’t get their first exposure to Cajun culture from a Paul Prudhomme cookbook. Blank and Gosling have made several documentaries on Louisiana music figures, and Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label was the first outside the state to extensively record zydeco and Cajun artists. The research on the pre-World War II development of Cajun culture and music is exemplary, but zydeco and the postwar world get relatively short shrift.

With musician Michael Doucet of the group Beausoleil and folklorist Barry Jean Ancelet serving as expert authorities, “French Dance Tonight” maintains a conversational, non-academic tone. Ancelet’s description of the late zydeco king Clifton Chenier’s innovations--”He took unaccompanied, black group singing . . . and put it to instruments, jacked it up about 50 notches and took it off in the stratosphere”--is both representative and accurate.

Often, it’s what the filmmakers don’t do that lingers--like letting the camera play across vintage photographs, shots of the Louisiana countryside or couples slow dancing in a zydeco club with no comment aside from the music. Everyday images--Marc Savoy standing on his accordion, Solange Marie Falcon remembering her grandmother’s chaperon technique, aged fiddler Canray Fontenont’s broad grin as he plays, a dance-hall owner scattering sawdust on the floor--speak volumes in “French Dance Tonight.”