Runtime: 90 minutes

Written by: Erica Tremblay, Miciana Alise

Directed by: Erica Tremblay

Starring: Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Shea Whigham, Audrey Wasilewski, Ryan Begay

By Sarah Manvel

Lily Gladstone has two movies doing the festival circuit this year. “Fancy Dance” is the less glamorous of the two but it’s as important for three reasons. Firstly, it’s partially shot in Cayuga, a critically endangered Native language that cowriter/director Erica Tremblay spent three years studying, and this movie means the language will be kept alive a lot longer. Secondly, it’s an own voices Indigenous story about Indigenous lives, giving it the authenticity and kindness than only a story told from the inside can have (and for all its star wattage and expertise, “Killers of the Flower Moon” simply can’t offer that). Finally, it’s a love story being an aunt and a niece, an interpersonal dynamic that’s not often explored onscreen. 

Jax (Ms Gladstone) is a lesbian who lives on a reservation in Oklahoma with her sister Tawe and Tawe’s daughter Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). Roki is twelve, a champion fancy dancer (the term for the ceremonial dances done at powwows), and old enough to steal keys that a fisherman unwisely turned his back on for a truck that Jax immediately sells for chop. The money’s extra needed because Tawe is missing. She’s a stripper with some unsavoury personal connections around the state, but she’s never been gone this long before, nor so out of contact with Jax. The reservation is a largely lawless place, where thanks to loopholes between state and federal law there’s minimal protections other than being known. The main cop is Jax’s half-brother JJ (Ryan Begay), a well-meaning but overwhelmed man caught between his duties and his family responsibilities. Because of the noise Jax is making about Tawe’s disappearance, the state realises no one has responsibility for Roki, and because Jax has a criminal record she won’t be allowed to foster her. 

There are people willing to take Roki, though – her white grandfather Frank (Shea Whigham) and his current wife Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski in a thankless but important part), who were unable to have children of their own and who have kept their distance for most of Roki’s life. Carolina Costa’s camera moves alongside the characters without judgement and Robert Grigsby Wilson’s editing style maintains the pace without overdoing the tension. Nancy is delighted to have a child in the house but incapable of understanding the cultural differences at play here, especially as Roki insists that Tawe will return in time for an upcoming powwow. As Jax decides to take the investigation for Tawe into her own hands, she makes the snap decision to bring Roki along with her. Will Roki be safe with Jax? Will Frank call the cops on his own daughter? Most of all, will Tawe be found?

As the plot unfurls, we have time to consider whether Jax is a bad person, or a person who has been forced to make bad choices because no good ones have been allowed to her, whether through racism, the surveillance dragnet (there’s a darkly ironic sequence where they are overheard speaking Cayuga by an ICE policeman in a parking lot and forced to prove they are Americans), or simple bad choices there’s no coming back from. Jax’s love for Roki is as plain as a nose, but she also steals cars, sells drugs, breaks into houses and uses the five-finger discount in various stores. Nancy’s upset over Jax’s behaviour and its impact on Roki is all the more annoying because she has a point. But Ms Tremblay is looking at the bigger picture here, and Ms Gladstone’s underlying decency makes the bigger point about the plot: Jax and Roki are the only people who really care that Tawe is gone, so should smaller crimes really matter in face of whatever has befallen her? 

It’s this nuance and this organic understanding of people all their messy glory that gives “Fancy Dance” its edge and it being broadly age-appropriate for its child character is a minor triumph. Ms Deroy-Olson is a match for Ms Gladstone as a young woman learning about life’s unfairness and cruelty despite her family’s best efforts to protect her as long as possible. Her menstruation subplot is a welcome one, too. But as with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Fancy Dance” is Ms Gladstone’s movie. Its ending is simultaneously a celebration of life, a burst of grief, a mark of historical respect and the ending of an entire way of life, and only possible because of Ms Gladstone’s skill. What an excellent movie.