Sundance 2022: Calendar Girls

The titular Calendar Girls (Sundance Film Festival)

Anyone who's ever been to a state fair has seen a group like The Calendar Girls. Some mishmash of eager performers take the stage in hand-sewn costumes. They proceed to sidestep and "Macarena" their way through old Top-40 hits. Maybe they capture an attentive audience. Maybe they perform to a scant few. It doesn't seem to matter. At the end of the show applause will come reigning down, if only at the hands of the performers and those affiliated with them. As the troupe merges into a scrum, ready to celebrate and debrief, insincere gawkers saunter away, mumbling mocking comments under their breath.

Maria Loohufvud and Love Martinsen likely saw a similar performance, but rather than dismiss it they responded instead with a robust curiosity that led them down the next four years of their lives. Their debut feature, aptly titled Calendar Girls, follows an all-female, predominantly 65+ dance group of the same name who perform at events all across southwestern Florida. This both is and is not a film about dance and performance. More so than anything, it's about what it means to be alone for a long time and how glorious it is to finally feel energized, supported, and loved.

The first time we see The Calendar Girls take the stage, they're dressed as unicorns. A multicolored horn adorns each head. The women all coordinate accessories, wearing statement earrings, smokey-eye makeup, and the same shade of lipstick. As they traipse out onto a slightly elevated surface in the center of a nursing home common space, we hear a voice. "These are all women of a certain age," it says, "But they still love to dance [...] they are not all professional dancers. But they love this." Then a remix of "Come All Ye Faithful" busts out over the speaker system and we're off to the races.

I'll admit, I scoffed. The movements are simple: lots of arm gestures and shimmies. The costumes, ridiculous and over-the-top. All that said, the women are in hot demand, performing between 100 and 130 days a year. Tack on an extra 100 of rehearsal days and you've got yourself a full-time gig post-retirement.

During this initial dance sequence, and a secondary off-stage dance sequence immediately afterward, the filmmakers showcase their technical prowess. The film is deeply cinematic, even as a nonfiction document. The camerawork is consistently beautiful, capturing that distinct south Florida flatness. Likewise, they take great care in depicting interior spaces: home and venues, always framing shots in such a way as to capture the essence of the persons occupying them. But the dance scenes are particularly noteworthy. Loohufyud and Martinsen use the performances as crucial pivot points in the film, focusing in on a different dancer each time just as that woman's story is being told. Their constant use of slow-motion here feels almost manipulative at first, but ends up enhancing so many of the film's most significant moments.

The Calendar Girls have roughly 30 members. The film focuses in on about five. Catherine leads the pack, facilitating upcoming performances, ideating themes and costume ideas, bringing in new members, and running rehearsal. She's incredibly slender, always wearing leggings, a black tank top, and a baseball cap with her hair in a tight ponytail. Her eyes have that unwavering, unblinking quality so synonymous with hyper-determined leaders. At first glance one might think her a retired Admiral rather than the type of person who performs as a unicorn twice a week. At the outset of the film, as we see her taking walks at night to talk pointedly on the phone about Calendar Girls matters, she seems excessive in her approach. Something so light in its essence doesn't require that kind of leadership, one assumes.

But as the film progresses and Loohufyud and Martinsen introduce the viewer to more characters, it becomes clear just how significant the group is. Very few of the women featured have clearly-established names. The film often treats the group as a whole, and the individual women as crucial, functioning elements of it even when given their own narrative threads. One name we do learn is Nancy Sewell, a retired police officer from Baltimore who spent years undercover buying and selling drugs. The camera pans around her home, noting a photograph of her in uniform and an amusing juxtaposition of shoes: unicorn slippers (presumably connected to The Calendar Girls) next to black combat boots. It's these moments that add such quick depth to the characterization. As the camera roams we hear Nancy say, "I've never hung out with females before [...] I've come into a world of thirty sisters." Herein lies the power of the group: as a meeting point for wayward souls approaching the last stages of their lives. Women who, for one reason or another, have gone through life missing something: a passion, an outlet, a place to be authentically themselves.

Another Calendar Girl, the woman who designs and makes many of the costumes, says, "I didn't know that I could do any of this [...] I didn't know that I could create like that." Here: another point of significance. These women are actively developing a better understanding of themselves, deepening the content of their lives. This costumer in particular is frequently seen in conflict with her husband (the only man featured in the film). He, like those dismissive state fair attendees, thinks the group is ridiculous and a waste of time. As he lazes about in recliner chairs, asking her to fetch him things, she hunkers down in the basement, toiling away in her craft room and loving every minute of it.

Slowly you begin to love these women, even having only met them in bursts. When the costumer takes the dog for a walk at night so she can practice choreography away from her husband, your heart aches for her. The films captures so many different brands of confusion, frustration, and tragedy. If it's not an inert marriage and controlling husband, it's something else. One woman joined the group through a friend after getting out of prison. She was lost and knew no one, but the group welcomed her "with arm arms" and "helped [her] grow as a person. Another, new to the group, struggles to get comfortable. She says that she's spent her whole life caring for others: her husband, her children, and now her grandchildren. She wants to live for herself, do something for herself.

Common among these three threads is this notion of liberation and self-actualization. The Calendar Girls acts as a gateway towards a more authentic self. It's not easy to establish this idea and make it resonate within the constraints of a 90-minute documentary with numerous figures. The film succeeds in its ability to condense the powerful moments, cut all the fat between them, and present incredibly efficient narratives. Likewise, the editing deserved endless plaudits. Not just the base order of women that we meet and the interplay we see them have, but also how the film balances individual stories with the Calendar Girl rehearsals and performances which remain constant throughout the film. These two zones, the individual zone and the CG zone, always work in harmony, elevating the other. It's a true accomplishment.

For instance: the new member struggles in rehearsal to learn all the moves, she feels unsure what kind of makeup to apply and how to fit in with the other dancers, she Facetimes her adult daughter while in her CG costume for the first time and the daughter responds with strained encouragement. There's nothing but stressors in her individual narrative. But then her first performance comes. The women dance, big smiles on their faces, and the camera fixes on her in slow-motion. Right after we see her walk across her driveway and apply an enormous Calendar Girls sticker to her car's rear window. That kind of gradual build occurs in each mini narrative, knocking the viewer out time and time again with this moments of beauty and bliss.

Nancy Miller, a worker for an electricity company, is sick and getting sicker. Her stomach doesn't function the way it should and she can't eat, losing energy by the day. She can't retire yet, so her involvement in The Calendar Girls can't go on. Eventually she reaches the breaking point after numerous close-quarters scenes with the filmmakers. She crouches in their rehearsal space as things get underway. The camera sees her crying, looking around knowing it's the last time. When they discuss future performances she won't be dancing in, she cries. And so do we. When they finally rehearse, going through the numbers, she dances for the last time. She cries, and so do we.

Each of these featured women have found salvation and respite in The Calendar Girls in different ways. Whether it's an escape from their personal history, their marriages, their families, their illnesses, their internal disappointments, the group (with all its pomp and circumstance) gives them whatever it is they need. Through that, the film gives the viewer what they need: a space to empathize with a group they may often write off, a space to reflect on their circumstances of their own lives and their own sources of joy, and, ultimately, a space to experience emotion as authentically as the women in the film do during each performance. In truth, it's a marvel.