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Fancy Dance Expands the Lily Gladstone Heartbreak Canon
Erica Tremblay’s portrait of Indigenous womanhood is as idyllic as it is bristling.
When Roki dresses up in her mother’s fringed shirt and stripper heels to silently rehearse a powwow routine, she straddles the line between child and adult, heritage and performance, exoticization and self-empowerment — and embodies a multiplicity of experience. Like that film’s screenplay did, Tremblay and Alise organically incorporate the closely held cultural conventions of their characters (the games they play, the songs they sing, the foods they eat) and emphasize how beliefs are passed down through generations and maintained over time. But every so often Fancy Dance serves up a scene so barbed — like when a power-tripping ICE agent takes notice of Roki and Jax speaking Cayuga and interrogates them on where they’re from — that it’s impossible to miss how this film isn’t just a celebration of Native customs like the powwow.
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