Don’t go to Save The Last Dance hoping for knock your socks off dancing because there isn’t any, whether you’re a fan of hip hop or even of ballet. Still Save The Last Dance has enough jump to it to make it of interest on the inter-racial front.

There aren’t many films where black and white actors play parts where they mix intimately, but black/white relationships on American film seem to be undergoing a bit of a sea change of late judging by the movies showing in our multiplexes at the moment

First there’s Traffic which has a young white female junkie (played by Erika Christensen) begging a black male dealer to give her a hit of heroin while she’s having sex with him.

And given that Traffic demythologizes the drug trade, their relationship is carnal in the extreme, and like almost everyone in Traffic, neither is blameless. The drug trade is what’s awful but she’s certainly a willing sexual participant with her equally willing black lover.

Then in Finding Forester a young, poor black man (played by Robert Brown) is befriended by a fellow white, rich female student (Anna Paquin) at her up market school.

They don’t sleep together, but are obviously very close and develop a strong friendship. That’s certainly has not been common in Hollywood!

Save The Last Dance takes black white romance a step forward and in the nicest possible way. Julia Stiles plays Sara, an aspiring ballet dancer who on the death of her mother goes to live with her father in a tough, black neighborhood where she attends an almost black school.

Hip Hop dance is all the rage in the ‘hood and the familiar "giving the girl street cred. scenario" starts to develop. Sara has failed an audition earlier in the film for a top ballet school and it’s just a matter of waiting to see how effective the "modern" segment of her ballet audition will be in the final scenes.

She’s seemingly unfazed by the racial mix of her school and makes friends quickly with Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas) and his sister Chenille (Kerry Washington).

There is resentment however from some of the black women at the school, who see this white girl as a threat, especially when she and Derek, who’s very attractive, start to hit it off.

And boy do they hit it off, but in a very nice, adult way. They like each other a lot but she want’s to be a dancer and he wants to be a doctor. The white girl and the black boy kiss openly in public and sleep together.

There’s an interesting scene where the couple jokingly smooch in public to offend a white woman. We’ve certainly come a little way since that shocking view in a rear view mirror of Sidney Poitier kissing his white girlfriend in Look Who’s Coming To Diner (1967).

But what of the dance scenes? Well there’s nothing too exciting. Get Center Stage out on video, last year’s wonderful dance film, if you want to be inspired. But they were real dancers and it showed.

But then again who would really know? In Save The Last Dance relentlessly violent camera pans and cutaways in the modern music video style successfully ruined any choreography and dancing ability that might have existed.

3 Black and White Flys