Five Dances is a really lovely little film. It’s about four modern dancers hired to learn a piece for a performance in New York City, combined with a coming-of-age story involving the main character Chip, just off the bus from Kansas. The film mostly takes place in one generic but characterful New York practice studio, where they learn the dance and get to know each other. The story is broken into six vignettes, partitioned by five short dance performances, each performed in the same practice studio, to different selections from the film’s very cool contemporary folk-indie soundtrack. The film gently lulls you, and is very pleasing to watch.

First of all, the dancing is gorgeous, and is filmed very well, mostly using well-judged stationary camerawork so you can really see the dancers do their thing. They could take this approach because unlike a film like Black Swan, the folks in this film can actually dance – their movement is so beguiling, and the five performances melded so beautifully to the folk-indie soundtrack, that your pulse heightens in anticipation of each performance sequence – that alone is quite a cinematic achievement, in my opinion.

But what surprised me about the film was not so much the dancing (which I hoped would be great,) but the way the rest of the film held together. The dialog in the film was definitely sparse, but unlike most modern indie films it did not consist of the barely-coherent stammering of normal people. Instead, this dialog was actually written quite well, and at the end of the film I was kind of amazed at how much of a sense I got of each character, given how little dialog there actually was. I think it’s because the dialog and the physical acting was co-crafted extremely well, and all the dancers actually give really strong acting performances. Clearly this film was directed beautifully.

My only quibble with the film is toward the end, when the story narrows considerably to the homosexual awakening of the main character toward the other male dancer – this is fine, of course, and was actually done really beautifully. But one consequence is that the two women, who were also interesting characters, never really blossom as such, indeed it feels like they are kind of abandoned two-thirds of the way through the story. It’s far from a deal-breaker – the story is fine as it is – but I did find myself wishing that the four characters could have been a bit more consistently featured throughout the film, just because you find yourself wanting to know more about all of them, not just the two men.

I highly recommend Five Dances. It’s at Cinema Village right now, and if you’re not in New York, be sure to Netflix it when it comes out – it should stream almost immediately.