Featured Alignment: Film Threat Reviews
Love is a friendship that caught fire, and it sure is fun seeing the sticks rub together in filmmaker Apollo Bakopoulos’s radiant debut feature Aligned. Aeneas (Panos Malakos) is a modern dancer in Greece who can’t give himself a break. He is always putting himself down, letting internal negativity poison his self-worth. Dance provides both an escape as well a direction for him to embrace himself. Meanwhile, in NYC, another modern Greek dancer, Alex (Dimitris Fritzelas), is flying to Greece to perform in a show there. His girlfriend, Dianne (Mantalena Papadatou), is worried about being apart for three months, as he may run around with girl dancers over there. Lucky for her, Alex is paired with Aeneas as his dance partner, and they are roomies on top of that. They dance beautifully together. Alex is swept away by the emotions over being in Greece again after living in NYC, savoring the joys of life in the slow lane. Aeneas is swept away by Alex and dreams of being with him intimately. However, when Aeneas gets up the nerve to make his move, Alex doesn’t react well. He is surprised and uncomfortable and runs off to work out on a punching bag. These two move so well together, but days before the performance, they could not be further apart . One reason I was lucky enough to be assigned Aligned is my background as a modern dancer. It involves a lot of improvisation, where you are trying to project emotion through your movements.
Bakopoulos, in his first attempt, reaches the radiant Dirty Dancing zone with maximum sensuality without sinking into softcore. The sexual tension it creates will pull at your belt buckle like a magnet for the duration of your run. The dance causes the audience to evoke a physical relationship even when that is not the case. It’s interesting how the fantasy sequences allow the viewer to taste these two combinations without losing the tension because it’s just a dream. Furthermore, Bakopoulos offers us something beyond mere consumption. From Aeneas’s first voiceover, we are thrust into a deeper emotional arena where we learn to stop denying ourselves. It’s these additional moves that elevate Aligned above a simple romance. It also leads to an unusual ending that is certainly unpredictable and in-universe. Aligned has a battalion of striking visuals with beauty carved into each frame. The spectacular cinematography by Dan Kneece delivers vista after vista to our pleasure centers. Whether it is panoramas of Greece from above or bodies rippling through the air, the camera drinks it down like wine, one glass after another. The editing flows with the ease of inebriation. The fluidity of the movements is matched by a cutting pace that moves past slick into frictionless. All of this makes for some fantastic dance scenes.
Malakos and Fritzelas move great together, generating a lot of energy. It’s interesting to evaluate how the actors express themselves while dancing compared to the dialogue; You can literally see their wings open and close. I love how Bakopoulos continually changes the audience’s perspective of Malakos and Frirtzelas, because it gives each the opportunity to become the elusive North Star of the other’s wishes. New York neighborhoods can be a little cheesy, but that’s mostly because New York itself has become cheesy. The modern dance capital of the world cannot be overlooked, but New York is quickly joining other great fallen cities like Constantinople, whose power and relevance were entrenched for an era. passed. Bakopoulos’s homage to the Big Apple here may be the old girl’s best last hurrah on her way out. Aligned is a membrane that will seep into your pores and stay with you for a long time.