MOVIES I MISSED IN 2016: SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE

It's easy to imagine the same basic stuff of The Fits turning into a stock indie coming-of-age drama: 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower), with few friends her own age or gender, finds herself losing interest in boxing at the Cincinnati community center with her brother Jermaine (Da'Sean Minor) and his friends. Instead she starts spying on the dance drill team, the Lionesses, that practices in the in same community center, and begins to fantasize about joining them. Which, in due course, she does, though in so doing she discovers that she doesn't fit in any better with these girls than with the boys.

It's easy to imagine the stock indie coming-of-age drama version of The Fits even being quite good: Hightower has a naturalistic ease as Toni, who is certainly one of the most sympathetic child characters I saw in any 2016 release, which gives it a leg up right from the start. And then there's the film's sense of discovery: coming-of-age stories about 11-year-old girls are not common, stories about African-American girls are not common, stories about the African-American community in Cincinnati are entirely unknown to me, and the fact that writer-director Anna Rose Holmer is white doesn't meaningfully get in the way of her stepping into that community center and finding it a space teeming with life in unexpected corners and full of strong personalities.

Ah, but the good news is that The Fits isn't a stock movie at all: in literally every way I can think to name, it's a bold-faced statement of individuality. It's Holmer's first feature, after several years as a cinematographer and camera assistant, and quite a hell of a calling card it is: as promising a directorial debut as anything else the 2010s have produced, if I may be so bold. Toni's story isn't told as a simple slice-of-life realist fable of childhood, but as an impressionistic sweep of conflicting tonal registers and unexpected, dramatic visuals. It is a story told almost entirely without words - very nearly all of the dialogue in the first 20 minutes or so is delivered by offscreen (and often unidentified) speakers, and frequently that dialogue is an empty signifier, mostly just noise that Toni and thus the viewer hears without processing. Even as the script gets (relatively) wordier as it goes along, the dialogue rarely does anything other than briefly get all of the characters on the same page.

Instead, meaning is generated through space and movement. Holmer and cinematographer Paul Yee go crazy with compositions that crush Toni down into the corner of frames filled with air - it's like a symphony of negative space, a huge and indifferent world that Toni wanders through without having a place in it, almost an incidental component of several compositions, particularly exteriors. As for how she and the rest of the cast move through that space, now that's a special thing unto itself. The Fits is, in some respects, a dance movie, although the filmmakers capture the dance routines in angles and short takes that in no ways ask us to appreciate the dancing as dancing. And the most balletic motions in the film aren't anyways the performances, but the choreography of the rehearsal, and the vividly uncertain - not necessarily uncomfortable - way that Toni inhabits her own flesh (Hightower's dancing is not graceful, and that's very important; it is, however, very deliberate and controlled, and that's important too). The absence of movement matters, too: when Toni, with brand-new pierced ears, stares into the camera like a mirror and gently pokes at one earlobe, the stillness of the shot except for her hand generates an unexpectedly potent sense of awareness of her ears and how she feels about them physically and emotionally.

The story of The Fits isn't just about a girl trying and failing to make friends and fit into a new social group. It is, in fact, a story about the fits: shortly after Toni joins the team, the other girls, always one at a time, are struck by some kind of inexplicable seizure. As more and more of them have these fits, always coming out perfectly fine and somehow beatific about their experience, a new division rises between the ones who have and have not had the fits; Toni herself does not have them, while her only two friends in the Lionesses, Beezy (Alexis Neblett) and Maia (Lauren Gibson), both do, and thus she is once again cut out from having a social life. This is an obvious and straightforward metaphor for the onset of menstruation, but the metaphor isn't nearly as interesting as what Holmer does with it: she uses it as a means to turn The Fits into a thriller, a mystery, a horror film, without actually doing anything that's suspenseful or horrifying. I genuinely can't think of anything else like it. The thing is, the film actively and constantly insists that we read it in this generic frame: the opening image of the film is Toni doing sit-ups, as her voice whispering on the soundtrack as she counts; but her counting doesn't match her facial expressions or mouth movement. It's ghostly and uncanny, and it's the first thing we encounter in the film. It insists that we find something off-kilter about this. So does the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Juriaans, a modernist dirge that scrapes along on the soundtrack like the Ligeti music in The Shining. Listening to the music, you keep waiting for the moment that Toni's eyes roll over black and she starts vomiting blood; nothing vaguely like this happens, of course, and the scenes of the girls having fits are even presented so casually, and with such fascination at the choreographed movement of their bodies (when Maia has her fit, the rest of the girls sweep back in a very beautiful overhead shot that feels like something from Busby Berkeley, if Berkleley made neorealist films), that you cannot possibly call it scary; you cannot even call it disturbing.

What we've got, I think, is a completely subjective film, in which every shot exists as an extension of Toni's mood, as does the film's own genre. Growing up, of course, is scary. The onset of puberty is scary. Feeling like nobody wants you around is scary. So why shouldn't a film depicting these things from the highly subjective experience of an isolated 11-year-old act like everything is scary, even if nothing actually is? Because that's really what the film is about: what it feels like and looks like to be Toni. Every shot that leaves her isolated and vulnerable in the world is doing that. So does the shot of her rolling a water bottle almost as big as she is down the hall, and the camera crouches over her to block out anything she's not aware of. So does the moment when her brother is talking to her, and is kept so far out of focus that he's barely legible as a human figure. So does the hypnotising close-up of a her tearing a temporary tattoo off her body, slowly enough to focus on the gluey texture distending. And so on and so forth through literally every new shot in the movie. This film gives everything over to Toni's perspective, breaking all kinds of norms of pacing, of camera set-ups, of the appropriate music to use in certain moods and genres, and everything else to make sure that we understand that we're taking up space inside her head. Instead of the objective realism of so many indies, it subscribes to a kind of subjective realism - I called it "impressionistic", and I will happily stand by that, for that's exactly what The Fits is: using visual arts to indicate the interior sensation of one of the year's most fascinating and rewarding characters.

9/10