Dance with me REVIEW
Despite its many flaws, it's difficult not to like Randa Haines' latest film, the effervescent Dance with Me. As is true of most "performance" movies, the central attraction isn't the characters or the narrative. Instead, it's the look, the feel, and, most importantly, the music. Dance with Me isn't intended to be a deeply introspective look at the struggles of a man and woman to overcome their individual emotional troubles and find each other. Instead, it uses these familiar, lightweight plot elements as a foundation for the series of colorful, energetic dance sequences that represent the real reason to see this movie.
The stars of the film are Vanessa L. Williams and Chayanne. Williams, the former Miss America- turned singer-turned actress, plays Ruby, a by-the-book professional dancer who's looking to win a World Latin Dancing Championship before she hangs up her shoes and costumes. Chayanne, the Latino sensation who isn't as well-known north of the Border as he is south of it, is Rafael, a free- spirited Cuban who has come to Texas in search of the father he never knew. Like Ruby, he's an accomplished dancer, but he's strictly an amateur. For him, what he does on the dance floor isn't a matter of pre-arranged moves; it's what the music tells him to do. At one point, when he observes Ruby practicing her steps in a silent studio, he asks, "How can you dance without music? It comes from the music." Thus we have the introduction of the time-honored metaphor of how dancing represents life (see also such recent entries as and ).
