*Get "Alive and Kicking" on Amazon here*
*Get On the Boardwalk by Martin Sherman on Amazon here*
The terminally underrated Jason Flemyng plays a dancer with AIDS who falls for someone unexpected in this dramedy.
Flemyng is Tonio, a dancer in London who is watching seemingly everyone around die from the disease. Infected himself, he and his dance troupe try to power on through a difficult performance under the mentally unstable eye of Luna (Dorothy Tutin, offering up a touching performance). Tonio meets the mysterious Jack (Antony Sher) at the funeral for his mentor/friend Ramon (Anthony Higgins), and learns Jack was counseling Ramon through his fatal diagnosis. Tonio and Jack begin to see each other, and complications arise almost immediately. Jack is HIV-negative, so physical sexual contact is difficult. Tonio throws himself into the upcoming performance, but his body begins having other ideas. Jack has issues of his own, drinking and smoking too much, perhaps racked by guilt that he does not have the very disease he is trying to coach others through. Tonio and his best friend Millie (Diane Parish) confide in each other as Tonio and Jack fight and make up ad nauseam.
While the performances are great all around, Tonio and Jack are hard characters to like. Tonio expresses his emotions through his dancing, but when he isn't onstage, watch out. Jack begins drinking his feelings away, asking Tonio some hard-hitting questions (why aren't you angry? would you have given me a second look if you weren't sick?) that both Jack and the viewer never get answers to. The dance troupe and Jack's counselor friends are all cliquey, and that does repel (again) both the men and the viewer. This isn't a "bad" thing, but where the film does falter is in its romantic conventions in an otherwise uncoventional romance. Jack and Tonio go away on vacation (if I see one more scene of someone's ashes getting scattered, and blowing back onto the person doing the scattering, I will scream). Their bickering gets tiring, and the film's pacing begins to suffer since we know the outcome of what will happen in the next scene- fight, make up, fight, make up, fight, make up...
Flemyng was Dr. Jekyll in "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman," and was one of the best things about that film. I could imagine him in a Bond/007 villain role. While he expresses all of Tonio's emotions facially and physically, his voice is velvety deep and rich, but slightly monotone (think Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter). His Tonio isn't flighty and light, his bitchiness has an edge even in lighter moments (such as the droll scene where he and lesbian Millie decide to throw caution to the wind and have sex, or his tantrum before a performance). I didn't like the original title, "Indian Summer" (the name of the production that Tonio and Millie are in), as well as the American "Alive and Kicking," which sounds like a documentary about a spunky troupe of octogenarian tap dancers.
Nancy Meckler's direction is good, but Martin Sherman's script is tonally off-putting. Trust me, I'm an expert at unlikely romantic pairings, and while Tonio and Jack go through the paces, I found myself checking the clock once in a while. If anyone else but Flemyng had been in the lead role, you probably could knock a couple of points off my rating.
MPAA Rated R for profanity, nudity, sexual content, strong sexual references, adult situations, mild drug use, strong alcohol and tobacco use.
