Flashdance (1983) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Belinda Bauer, Lilia Skala
screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Bill Chambers "FLASHDANCE." It's hardly a coincidence the Rocky movies started this way, with the title scrolling horizontally across the screen like a ring girl's sign for the upcoming round. Then we fade up on our heroine, mythologized via obscured features, cycling confidently through the city to the anthemic strains of the late Irene Cara's "Flashdance… What a Feeling"–a montage that riffs on the iconic opening titles of Saturday Night Fever. And that, in a nutshell, is Flashdance: Rocky meets Saturday Night Fever, albeit with a female lead and considerably less dramatic tension than either. It is perhaps more that referencing these pop-culture juggernauts at the outset establishes a vernacular, translating a movie for the masses that only half-heartedly yields to formula. Flashdance is weird with a beard. It's elliptical and largely free of plot, featuring a modern-day fairytale heroine navigating an urban jungle awash in mimes and breakdancers (but curiously few cars), which is captured voyeuristically with long lenses and natural light like cinéma vérité­­ on Mars.

18-year-old Alex is a welder built like a brick shithouse who lives alone in a cavernous loft with only a big ugly dog named Grunt for company. Every day she bikes back and forth to her job at the steel mill, and the first time Alex lifts her welder's helmet to reveal the feminine features and luscious mane of Jennifer Beals, it's a gotcha moment producing partners Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer would fashion into something of a trademark with the "surprise, she's a woman" reveals of flight instructor Kelly McGillis in Top Gun and jewel thief Brigitte Nielsen in Beverly Hills Cop II. Yet one of the central fascinations of Flashdance is that Alex appears to face zero sexism in her male-dominated profession–unless you count the fact that her wealthy and charming boss, Nick (Michael Nouri), won't stop flirting with her. This is because he's seen her on stage at Mawby's, whose neon dive-bar exterior belies its status as Pittsburgh's answer to the Kit Kat Klub, where men of industry go to eat hamburgers and enjoy avant-garde dance acts that are as much art installations as anything else, sexy in that androgynous '80s way. At one point, Alex dons kabuki makeup and recreates the "Blown-Away Guy" ad campaign for Maxell, using light from the television to cast a menacing shadow on the grid-patterned wall behind her. Like the song says, she's a maniac.

It's especially impressive considering how understaffed the place is: one cook; one owner/operator (Ron Karabatsos), who is somehow a patron of the arts despite comporting himself like Vic Tayback's philistine brother; and, by my count, one waitress, the adorable Jeanie (Sunny Johnson). The details, as you may have noticed, pile up like Mad Libs in Flashdance. The cook, Richie Blazik (Kyle T. Heffner), is an aspiring M.C. and stand-up comic who laughs at his own dismal jokes, many of which are about Polish people. (Lyne gives him the flop-sweat Bob Fosse spotlight treatment.) Jeanie is a competitive ice skater who curiously becomes a magnet for whatever darkness lurks on the film's periphery. Richie's nominal girlfriend (which is tragic enough), she gets the Tony Manero scenes of family strife, for instance–which, with a woman in his place, play like the uncomfortable filial dynamics of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. There are also two scuzzballs in the film, slick Johnny (Lee Ving) and mute Cecil (Malcolm Danare), plainly and risibly modelled on the fox and cat hustlers from Disney's Pinocchio. They loiter around Mawby's to scout talent for the Zanzibar, their strip joint, and after Alex fends them off, they set their sights on Jeanie, who succumbs to their grift in a moment of self-loathing. 

I presume we can attribute this particular sequence of events to co-screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, future Showgirls scribe, but it's a peculiarly hollow development: Alex storms the Zanzibar, drags Jeanie out, and that's that. A fraught tableau in which Alex stands on the ice while Jeanie skates circles around her is finally nothing more than the filmmakers keeping our eyes on the prize; this movie orbits Planet Alex. There are times when Flashdance plays like an extension of Foxes, Lyne's directorial debut, but it lacks even the meagre edge and feminine energy of that gynocentric coming-of-age flick. Though a scene where Alex, Jeanie, and Alex's fellow dancers Tina (Cynthia Rhodes) and Heels (Durga McBroom) work out together is infamous for its stylized staging, intercutting close-ups of the four women using gym equipment in a white void, it's the dialogue that strains credulity, so mindless ("He didn't call," "He'll call," "I don't think so, Alex," "He'll call, Tina") it goes beyond "men writing for women" into the territory of ChatGPT. With kiddie fantasy and musclemen dominating the box office, it's no mean feat that Flashdance was the third-highest-grossing domestic release of the year with an unknown actress in the lead. But just as the picture dismisses the polarities of white collar and blue collar, or highbrow and lowbrow, its simultaneous eroticization and tomboyification of Alex turns gender into something rife with contradiction yet free of conflict. Is it pandering to men or is it feminist, that she's both hot and cool–hot enough to send a shockwave through popular culture by removing her bra through the sleeve of her cutoff sweatshirt, and cool enough to rescue the movie's damsel in distress all by herself? That's the $64,000 question.

Whatever the answer, it was clearly a good commercial strategy. Alex, I've neglected to say, has an elderly mentor she checks in on, former ballerina Hanna (Austrian architect turned Academy Award nominee Lilia Skala), pushing her to try out for the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. A nice bit of visual storytelling sees Lyne and DP Don Peterman doing a tracking shot contrasting the dancers' feet in pointe shoes and leg warmers with Alex's stompy work boots and jeans, and panning across their faces to Alex eavesdropping on them, desperate to speak their clubby language. A gifted amateur in the Rocky mold, she's also the prototype for a certain streetwise savant we might define as the archetypal Simpson-Bruckheimer protagonist. Like the later Maverick and Cole Trickle, she gets the encouragement and tough love she needs from a vaguely inappropriate romantic interest. Through a modern lens, the picture's power dynamics are hugely problematic (Alex's principled rejection of Nick is presented as foreplay–to say nothing of Beals and Nouri's 19-year age difference offscreen), yet Alex and Nick's relationship is handled with a modicum of grace and practically the only thing in Flashdance that time hasn't reduced to kitsch. It's how the movie addresses the unavoidable reality that Alex can't, in her current station*, get an audition for the Conservatory without somebody connected–in this case, Nick–vouching for her. When she reacts badly to his meddling, Nick correctly intuits that he hasn't wounded her pride; she's just scared because she's out of excuses not to try out. Demonstrating what is for Flashdance not merely a remarkable faith in subtext but a sudden use for it as well, his palpable fear that she'll use him as an excuse to blow off the opportunity speaks volumes about his belief in her. Lyne was possibly born in this moment as a tireless chronicler of these tugs-of-war between the sexes.

Much Monday-morning quarterbacking greeted the success of Flashdance, a film that proved easy to parody–everyone including Miss Piggy spoofed it–and difficult to Xerox. (Most of the wannabes seemed to miss that beneath its sex drama and cheesecake, it's really quite a wholesome little hangout movie.) It had the good fortune to be aerobics-adjacent on the heels of Jane Fonda's zeitgeist-defining workout tape, and to have someone with Lyne's background in commercials at the helm–a visionary who could translate half-baked ideas into the fashionable form of music videos, which are just commercials without a product. Consequently, it's driven by pop music as much as narrative, and the brain trust of composer Giorgio Moroder, songwriters Keith Forsey and Cara, and music supervisor Phil Ramone developed a soundtrack that felt like some lost K-Tel compilation of radio favourites, even without factoring in ringers like Laura Branigan's "Gloria." And then, of course, there's that come-hither image of Beals on the film's iconic one-sheet.

All of this makes for a great Tinder profile but doesn't necessarily explain why people with better things to do–ahem–are writing about Flashdance 40 years later. That I think you can chalk up to the climactic audition, a celebration of music's liberating effect on the human body and soul so pure, so exhilarating, the only response is unconditional surrender. When I see a person move–or three people, technically (Beals plus body doubles Marine Jahan and Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, who did the breakdancing)–with this kind of unbridled passion, I get a lump in my throat. What a feeling, indeed. In addition to echoing our response, the toe-tapping of the admissions committee suggests Alex will receive an engraved invitation to the Conservatory–but the filmmakers know that literally telling us whether or not she got in would dispel the built-in catharsis of her performance. The sequence leaves you choked up and coked-up, high on the fumes of Flashdance; no surprise that in Times Square, the ending had moviegoers dancing in the aisles. Top Gun pulled off the same sleight of hand three years later, hitting an emotional crescendo in its homestretch that effectively wiped the slate clean of all the mediocrity leading up to it. In fact, for better or worse, it's the rare movie to realize Flashdance's exploitable potential, and it did so by using the grammar of advertising to actually sell something.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Paramount brings Flashdance to 4K UHD disc in a 1.78:1, 2160p presentation with Dolby Vision and HDR10 encoding. The transfer is identical to that of the enclosed Blu-ray from 2020 in terms of framing and grading choices and the overall character of the master. They share the same exceedingly minor print defects, too. That Blu-ray is excellent, but it may represent the ceiling for how good Flashdance can look in HiDef, owing to Lyne's fondness for diffusions: smoke, silhouettes, more smoke. (Paramount were so annoyed by the hazy dailies that Lyne had to hide the smoke can whenever they visited the set.) The inherently soft detail gets a modest bump in UHD and the wider colour gamut does more to inflame the movie's infernal reds and hot pinks. Overall, the image is darker, with a blunter though not crush-y drop-off to black. This results in higher contrasts; I don't know whether that or some additional noise-reduction explains why film grain is less conspicuous than it is on the SDR Blu-ray (perhaps a combination of both), but it's not detrimentally revisionist. HDR has been selectively applied to highlights: headlamps, magic-hour haloes, and neon signs are tastefully boosted while the white screens on stage and in the gym receive zero amplification, probably because it would create new exposure challenges for the figures in the foreground. Beware the use of a strobe starting at 54:28: it will light up your home theatre like the Fourth of July. One assumes the accompanying 5.1 DTS-HD MA track is adapted from the six-track mix prepared for 70mm engagements of Flashdance, which were apparently limited to European markets. "What a Feeling," "Maniac," et al. have the ferocity of a thunderstorm, and there's an attention to the discrete soundstage that's pretty advanced for the era. Dialogue, as we used to say around these parts, is lamentably clear.

Extras are exclusively found on the attendant Blu-ray. Two Laurent Bouzereau featurettes from 2007–"The Look of Flashdance" (9 mins., HD) and "Releasing the Flashdance Phenomenon" (9 mins., HD)–cover, roughly, the making and aftermath of the film via talking-heads with Lyne and other key players, although Beal is deafeningly absent. (No Eszterhas, either.) Here, Lyne says he should be called "selector rather than director," since most of his job entails making choices. In a likely unintentionally funny glass-half-empty/full juxtaposition, Nouri finds meaning in the film's setting of Pittsburgh, the realization of Andrew Carnegie's dream of an industrialized America, while Lyne waxes poetic about getting to point his camera at a factory-ravaged wasteland. The director obviously relishes the vindication of the picture's success, recalling that the faithless studio accused him of filling a test screening with friends and family when the scores came back reassuringly high. My favourite anecdote is that Lyne had a pipe installed at the steel mill to wet down the walls before a take, thus giving them a dynamic sheen, only to discover that turning on the water within the shot made for a stronger visual, however irrational the indoor rain. I also appreciated that he spares a word for the departed Simpson, Paramount exec Dawn Steel, and actress Johnson, who died of a sudden brain hemorrhage in 1984. When Lyne says he misses them, I truly believe him. Returning for another round of reflections 13 years later in 2020's "Filmmaker Focus: Adrian Lyne" (6 mins., HD), Lyne reveals he was offered A Chorus Line after Flashdance came out but turned it down, not wanting to be pigeonholed as a maker of musicals. He humbly remembers screwing up the wet dance initially by shooting it against a white background (meaning you couldn't see any of the water!), though I figure he made up for it with that pipe thing. Rounding out the Blu-ray platter is the film's quintessentially 1983 theatrical trailer. U.S. copies are additionally packaged with a voucher for a digital version of Flashdance.

* Regardless of how unusually flush she looks from a 2023 vantage.

95 minutes; UHD: 1.78:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision|HDR10), BD: 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English DVS 5.1, French DD 2.0 (Stereo), Spanish DD 2.0 (Stereo), German DD 2.0 (Stereo), Japanese DD 2.0 (Stereo), BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English DVS 5.1, French DD 2.0 (Stereo); UHD: English, English SDH, French, Castilian Spanish, Latin Spanish, German, Japanese, BD: English, English SDH, French; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Paramount

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