Dancing at the Blue Iguana

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Dancing at the Blue Iguana is a movie about strippers. Like most such films, close-ups of nude women are an important element. Any intellectual pretensions harbored by director Michael Radford are sharply contradicted by the abundance of shapely female bodies.

Radford provided the basic scenario (girls getting naked for men), allowing his actors to workshop and improvise their characters into life. This means that each of the half-dozen dancers has a section of the movie devoted to their particular brand of stereotyped sex-worker melodrama. This one's a junky, that one's secretly a poet, etc. Daryl Hannah turns in an impassioned performance as a naive underachiever whose dream is to adopt. Sandra Oh is the secret writer whose double lives are on the verge of collapse. Individual moments of clarity slide past quickly, leaving a group of women baring more of their bodies than their storm-swept souls.