Maria Loohufvud and Love Martinsen, a married couple as well as artistic collaborators, make their feature debut as directors with this affectionate portrait of the Calendar Girls, an amateur dance troupe based in southern Florida. Entirely made up of women over the age of 60, a few considerably older, the dancers perform on flatbed trucks in parades and retirement homes, community centres and private events in order to raise funds for Southeastern Guide Dogs, an organisation that trains guide dogs for veterans and other visually impaired people. Dressed in homemade, leg-revealing spandex and sparkle-festooned outfits that variously suggest unicorns or “patriotic reindeer” at Christmas time, the women perform dance sequences set to an eclectic selection of tunes, from Harry Belafonte’s Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora) and Everybody by the Backstreet Boys, to drone-forward EDM composed by Martinsen himself. There is, in fact, a scene where the women seem to break into a tightly planned routine (choreographed by Loohufvud) in the middle of loading the car, which adds a mild surreality to the proceedings.
As the film goes along, we get to know some of the women on a more personal level although the film-makers have chosen not to use any identifying subtitles to help track who’s who, as is often the fashion these days with documentaries. Still, it’s not hard to work out that Katherine Hardy Shortlidge is the main motivating troupe leader, a former cop who spent years undercover in the vice squad, who had found a new purpose in marshalling her dancers between rehearsals and performances. Another subject who gets prominent coverage is Nancy Miller, a woman still doing a physically challenging outdoor 9-to-5 job but who finds herself increasingly challenged to keep up due to a serious gastrointestinal condition that drains her health. A third woman bridles against a controlling husband who doesn’t want her diverting her energy away from him and their home; yet another, perhaps the most intriguing of all, is a former prisoner with a twangy southern accent, a massive Rottweiler and a butch fashion sense who works the troupe’s iPod.
It’s assembled with a fair amount of skill and craft, and clearly packaged in such a way as to charm audiences with its plucky cast of characters, boldly making a spectacle of themselves in the most positive way. They are defying a society that too often insists women of their age should just quietly disappear into the background, an attitude several rail against here. However, there’s no mention of politics anywhere, and you can’t help wondering how many of these veteran-supporting, American-flag-waving, all-white women are Trump voters or, as we see them slathering on gobs of “smoky” eye shadow and red lipstick in preparation for another performance, where the Calendar Girls stand on the subject of drag shows or trans rights. (This is Florida, of course, the place where governor Ron DeSantis recently boasted that “woke goes to die”.) The Swedish film-makers never probe any of that messy stuff and are clearly keen we just read these women as groovy grandmas having a good time, but it’s likely that they’re trickier characters than they appear and it’s a shame the film doesn’t want to probe a little deeper.
• Calendar Girls is released on 7 July at Bertha DocHouse, London and is available to watch on Amazon Prime in Australia.
