Strictly Big Time : ‘Ballroom’ Has Become a Worldwide Sensation

Like Fred Astaire in “Easter Parade” and Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing,” Australian dance star Paul Mercurio plays a dancer who suddenly loses his partner in the comedy “Strictly Ballroom,” opening Friday at the Goldwyn Pavilion and Cineplex Beverly Center.

And like Astaire and Swayze, Mercurio chooses the unlikeliest replacement, Tara Morice, who initially seems virtually shapeless, sexless and terminally tongue-tied. But she’s not so bad once she takes off her glasses, and soon--well, you know the rest:

Romance blossoms, the ugly duckling grows into a swan, the new partnership triumphs over an inevitable Big Misunderstanding and the film, like the dancers themselves, becomes something of an instant sensation.

That’s already happened to “Strictly Ballroom” in Australia, where it outgrossed every other release last year and is already the third most successful home-grown film in the country’s history. It was the No. 1 film in England, too, during its first month of release, grossing to date $30 million in limited release worldwide. It also generated plenty of talk at the Cannes and New York Film festivals and received 13 nominations for the 1992 Australian Film Institute Awards.

Since the film only cost $2 million to make, and the director and two young leads had never done a feature before, the scale of its success caught them by surprise. Something about the film’s irreverent portrait of the competitive ballroom dancing world in Australia obviously struck a chord with audiences far away.

“In Australia, it’s part of the vernacular,” says 30-year-old Baz Luhrmann, who directed and co-wrote the film. “People now say ‘Strictly this’ or ‘Strictly that.’ Centerfold models claim they were in the film and pose in ballroom costume, the Prime Minister talks about it, and every single (film) company in the world has offered us scripts in a very intense way, as well as asking, ‘What do you want to do?’ ”

Before “Ballroom,” Mercurio had been dancer and resident sex symbol in Graeme Murphy’s provocative Sydney Dance Company, appearing in the nude in the steambath scene of “After Venice” in New York in 1985 and alternately wearing a jockstrap and bath sheet for “Some Rooms” at Royce Hall four years later.

Now, at 29, he finds himself “chased around supermarkets by young screaming girls and, sometimes, their mothers,” he says.

Mercurio choreographed the rebellious mirror solo in “Strictly Ballroom,” wearing an undershirt so form-fitting you half suspect it’s body paint. To nobody’s surprise but his, that garment--officially a singlet--is being marketed in a special “Strictly Ballroom” version and he’s been hired for a TV commercial promoting it.

In addition, his own company, the Australian Choreographic Ensemble (a.k.a. Ace), is attracting new audiences due to his “Ballroom” renown and he’s negotiating for another film that would begin shooting in August.

Morice, too, has a new film in preparation--”Speed” for director Geoffrey Wright--and admits to being both amused and unnerved by her celebrity status. For instance, she and Mercurio get invitations to dance at ballroom competitions--ironic since neither exactly qualifies. Morice danced in several of Luhrmann’s stage versions of “Strictly Ballroom” that preceded the film but considers herself primarily an actress.

Mercurio had to learn ballroom dancing for the film, and “didn’t have a natural affinity for it,” according to John O’Connell, the film’s choreographer.

“His instinct was for the flamenco,” O’Connell explains. “There’s much more attack, it’s more dramatic and suited him better.”

Mercurio concurs: “Learning ballroom was the hardest part. I had studied flamenco a little bit as a young student and it’s so fiery and sensual, I love it. That’s what appeals to me about dance.”

Flamenco figures heavily in the plot as the dance that attracts Mercurio’s character after he rebels against the flamboyant but rigidly conservative world of competition ballroom.

It also reveals the obligatory Dark Secret about Morice’s character and heightens the film’s contrast between freedom of expression (identified with an ethnic minority) and an unyielding cultural Establishment (personified as delirious and often corrupt blonds).

“The conflict is between the creative process and the bureaucracy, which is the all-powerful (ballroom dancing) Federation,” Luhrmann says. “I’ve chosen to say that the bad guys have the blond hair and the good guys have the dark hair. It’s very simple graphic cartooning.

“Basically, though, it’s art versus sport. All dancing is a sport as far as the leaders of the federation are concerned, and it’s important for them to make those dancers believe that winning is everything. At the end, Paul’s character loses but wins--he loses the competition but wins the audience.”

Luhrmann’s mother was a ballroom dance teacher and he based the film, he says, on the career of “the father of dance in Australia, a guy named Pete Bain.

“He started out as a ballroom dancer and was carved up by the federation but he left and became the country’s greatest choreographer. He did ‘(Jesus Christ) Superstar’ and now teaches at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. He taught me dance and has taught Paul Mercurio at different times.”

He also taught Tara Morice, who remembers Bain as a wonderful ballroom partner. Beginning in 1982, Luhrmann created three different stage versions of Bain’s story before making Morice’s character Spanish--with a flamenco master for a father.

“The essential myth was always the same,” Luhrmann says, “and the aggressiveness of the storytelling was the same.”

It is that aggressiveness that caused the biggest stir over “Strictly Ballroom” among international critics in the festival screenings preceding the American release. “What we set out to do,” Luhrmann says, “was something that on the surface might seem like a Fred and Ginger piece--but with machine guns being shot at you straight through.

“I wanted to tell this story that everyone knows at such a terrific pace and in such a surprising way that people would be continually disarmed by it.

“You have to find the language that speaks to the people at a particular time,” he continues. “The stories themselves don’t change much. They’re the same classic myths that we’ve always believed in.”

Definitely a media brat, Luhrmann can relate that myth to “The Simpsons” one moment, opera or Bombay musicals the next, but his analysis keeps returning to Shakespeare: “The style is definitely satirical,” he says, “but with heart, like those Shakespearean comedies in which every character is ridiculed but all human failing is forgiven in the end.”

Not, however, before Mercurio makes one of the more spectacular entrances in film dance: a 30-foot slide across the floor on his knees wearing black pants and a golden matador jacket. “We used a few tricks for that one,” O’Connell admits, “but don’t print that. Don’t break the illusion.” Finally, he comes clean: “Part of the slide was on a trolley, which was done in a studio” a day before the rest of the sequence was shot on location. Small wonder: Slide 30 feet on your knees over most ballroom floors and you might not have much left of your legs, much less your pants.

O’Connell insists that most of the ballroom dancing in the film is “quite authentic,” even though “someone who’s not familiar with the ballroom world might find it over-the-top because it’s a very extravagant style. Most ballroom dancers I know who have seen the film don’t think they’re being laughed at.”

Now experienced in ballet, modern dance and his own “whimsical character style,” O’Connell was “a ballroom champion for eight years as a kid, but I had to go back and restudy it for the film because it had changed so much,” he says.

Indeed he and Luhrmann exploit the contrast between new and old ballroom styles in the film’s rumba sequence, with a glitzy display version danced in front of an audience while Mercurio and Morice simultaneously do an intimate, old-fashioned rumba backstage.

To Luhrmann, however, “Strictly Ballroom” isn’t “about dance, it’s about overcoming oppression,” and he identifies on the deepest possible level with his hero’s struggle for self-expression:

“I go to make a film about ballroom dancing in a country where all the films are about falling in love under a gum tree,” he says. “The reaction? ‘Absolutely not, no way, we’re not giving you the money, get out of here,’ big laughter.

“So I fight and fight and eventually I meet an outsider who’s never done a film before and eventually we get it made.

“Nobody supported us, no industry, no bureaucracy, it was ‘You’ll embarrass us; why are you dealing with our suburban culture when it’s much more romantic to sell the world our beautiful vistas?’

“But this is who we are and now, of course, it’s a national symbol.”