Saw Saturday Night Fever, expecting a Grease-like romp but actually getting a The Outsiders-style harsh look at the desperate lives of kids who hang out in dance halls, their bodies aging and their dreams drying up. It was a bit of a surprise.
The film follows Travolta, the Dancehall King, who works at a paint shop and dances every Saturday. He falls in love with a fancy dancy lady who disdains him and his life. "You're a cliché! You're nowhere on your way to no place." She's getting out of there and improving her life, but even she only works in a talent agency and brags constantly about getting movie stars coffee. Yeah, she's trying to get out of the slums, but she dances the nights away on the weekends too.
Outside of dancing, Travolta hangs out with a gang of tough kids who get into turf wars and get girls pregnant. There's a theme of people not really having direction - bumbling into marriages or jobs, as though that will bring their lives meaning or give them direction. It's ultimately pretty sad.
The film is teenage-focused. It's tough to remember sometimes because Travolta's character claims to be 19, despite Travolta being 23 (and likely only in movie-years) but these are kids, preoccupied by feeling good and looking good. They're having fun but they're seeing the unfairness of life and slowly recognizing that their dreams are hollow. But maybe the doomed pursuit of a dream is enough. They're not going to get fulfilling jobs and they're likely going to get trapped into marriages if they don't die in shootouts first. So why not just dance?
The film is surprisingly melancholy. It's not a total bummer. It dwells in desperation, but there's joy there too. The film is subtly about a search for meaning in life, and thus is a very adolescent kind of film. I wish they'd gotten actual teenagers to play these parts, but this is alright too. You do have tolerate a lot of disco however. This film loves its dance and musical interludes.
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