A woman in a man's world may be considered progressive, but a man in a woman's world is pathetic. That's like the key line in the movie Dance Like A Man starring Shobana, Arif Zakaria and Anoushka Shankar. It's a story about the struggles of a dance couple, in particular the social prejudices one faces as a male dancer. Initially I was less than impressed by the movie because it feels too much like a stage play, as if the director simply took a stage production to film in real houses and real streets and that's it; some of the actors were too theatrical while performing their lines, as if following directions in a play, when to laugh, when to raise the hand and so on. (Well actually the film is adapted from a play, written by Mahesh Dattani.) I was also wondering what's Ravi Shankar's daughter doing here trying to be an actress here instead of practising her sitar to carry the torch of her father. But the story slowly picks up momentum as it recounts the story of her screen father, Arif's character as a dancer when young. His father, a so-called progressive politician, finds it a disgrace that his son chooses to spend his life as a dancer instead of finding a career deemed respectable by conventional society. He disapproves of his son's dance guru whom he finds effeminate, and finds it scandalous that his daughter-in-law, Shobana's character, is learning dance from an old devadasi, no more than a prostitute in his eyes and in his neighbours' eyes.

What made me uncomfortable initially was also the fact that the movie is entirely in English, a little artificial and an apparent attempt to target an international audience. But on a more positive note, I suppose an international audience would be able to learn quite a bit about Indian society from this film. Things like Anoushka's character's future father-in-law saying outright that he has checked on her family background and is happy to know about her grandfather's social standing; or a musician asking Shobana's character for her favour when she is in a selection committee for overseas performances. The ending of the story may seem like unnecessary drama that is hardly enlightening or inspiring, even distracting from the issues about being a dancer, but the movie has already made its point about difficulties that Indian dancers go through, particularly the irony that we have Hindu gods said to be dancers, yet the little respect and support given to dancers in our society just do not correspond to that, in fact for a long time the art has been kept alive only by dancers equated with prostitutes. Those of us who are in the arts 'industry' today may have more stories to tell and may think the movie has not covered enough of all the misunderstandings and exploitations that an Indian dancer has to face, but you can't expect a single movie to cover everything. And if you are watching the movie expecting to see some dance, well there is enough in quantity to satisfy you. Unfortunately for Anoushka, even in this fiction, she has to stand in the shadows of an illustrious parent. While she is quite presentable in her dance sequences, the more exciting dance scenes all belong to Shobana, like the scene where she is dressed in a red blouse and dancing against the red walls of a mansion. My favourite is another dance performed to sitar music, with more creative or fusion dance movements than pure Bharata Natyam. Maybe she gets too dramatic in the role as a seductress, opening her eyes big in wonderment while doing hand gestures of flowers and bees in dazzling speed, but at least she is anything but boring. (Actually it reminds me of her performance in Singapore last year, where she was dancing to a remixed version of Thaaye Yasoda; everything went so fast it was over in a flash before you could really made head or tail out of it.)

Music for this film is composed by violin duo Ganesh and Kumaresh. It is in fact their instrumental music in the non-dance scenes that gives the movie a sensuous touch. Incidentally this violin duo has an interesting philosophy; they feel that artistes are limiting the scope of their instruments when they play only vocal music on them, and they have composed many purely instrumental raga-based compositions that they term as 'ragapravaham'.