I was not looking forward to seeing How She Move. It is the latest entry in the hip-hop/step dance subgenre that has proven to be consistently successful at the box office, but less so with the critics. Now, I know next to nothing about hip-hop and step dancing. I grew up on Lloyd Manor Rd. in Etobicoke and was once referred to as “the whitest white boy in the world,” so there you are.
I woke up at an ungodly hour on a dreary January morning to catch the press screening. All I could think about was how nice it would be to skip the movie and catch a few more hours’ sleep. Oh, sure, The Varsity would probably fire me, but man, some more sleep would be heavenly…
But no. Instead I got up and saw How She Move. And you know what? I’m glad I did, and not just because I would have been fired if I missed it. It’s a surprisingly good movie, and an above-par entry in its subgenre.
A Canadian production, the film is set at Jane and Finch, where an ambitious Caribbean-Canadian girl named Raya (Rutina Wesley) has been forced to return after her college money was used on her sister’s funeral. She needs money to break out of the ghetto environment and go back to college, and an unlikely salvation arises: she joins a step dance team working its way towards a championship. If they win the prize money, she’ll be able to afford college.
This plot is formula, but who cares? It has likable characters and a positive message, and it moves at a fast pace. The cast, most making their big-screen debuts, is uniformly excellent. And damn, I really liked those dance scenes. They were kinetic, energetic, and impressively choreographed, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a snob.
Two days later, I met the film’s director, Ian Iqbal Rashid, a Canadian filmmaker who garnered critical attention in 2004 with his first feature, A Touch of Pink. If you’ve seen that film, you’ll recall that it was about a gay Muslim who works up the courage to tell his mother about his sexuality… thanks to advice from the spirit of Cary Grant (played by Kyle MacLachlan, no less).
“The Canadian producers who coproduced A Touch of Pink also made How She Move, and initially they brought me on as a kind of story consultant, which I do from time to time,” said Rashid. “And then when they were looking for a director they were sort of interested in my take on it, and I kind of got invested in the project, and we went from there.”
“There was a lot in the script that I identified with and that felt familiar to me. The setting is very familiar for me, as I grew up in a neighbourhood like that in Toronto, and the story of Raya—second-generation immigrant kid who’s trying to get out and has her own ambitions to deal with, her own dreams to follow—that all sort of felt very familiar.”
How She Move was filmed in Hamilton in an astonishing 25 days. “The most I had on any dance number was four or five hours, whereas a Hollywood movie would be days if not a week for each number.” Rashid compensated with an extensive rehearsal period. “We had 25 days’ prep as well. It wasn’t a luxurious amount, but we just used every second of it. We put the kids through dance camp—they were dancing eight hours a day. Some of them had never acted before, so I was working with them doing improv and acting rehearsals as well. So that’s where we nailed the movie.”
Indeed, How She Move was one low-budget production. When I asked Rashid about the film’s gritty cinematography, he said, “That evolved just out of necessity. With 25 days to shoot, we had to come up with a visual strategy to help make the schedule and the budget, as well as tell the story. So we decided to go with a 16mm, handheld camera, which just is lighter, more mobile, we can get more coverage. We shot it like a documentary, really. That was our plan, really, just our way of getting our days, but it also gave it a sort of edge. And we just went from there. The colour palette we tried to keep quite neutral—the browns and greys—and the look emerged from that […] necessity is the mother of invention.”
Despite being a genre film, How She Move was a surprise official entry at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. “I was a bit surprised when we got in, because it is a kind of mainstream project, and I wasn’t sure that its indie credentials were enough to get us into Sundance. But they loved the movie and gave it a great slot, and […] we sold it within seconds.” The buyer was Paramount Vantage, which plans to release the film tomorrow on over 1,500 screens across North America.
For years people have moaned, “the musical is dead,” although the genre has seen a recent resurgence with the successes of Hairspray, Once, and High School Musical. For the most part, musicals from the last 40 years that have failed at the box office have been rigidly traditional, while the ones that are finding success today are the ones that are most eager to embrace contemporary music genres. Dare I say it, but perhaps a film like How She Move is the next logical step in the evolution of the musical
