★★★☆☆

113 min | NR | February 7, 2020 | Music Box Films

Merab dances in a Georgian ensemble that demands rigid masculine perfection. A new male dancer arrives, and Merab starts to come apart and together at the same time. The tradition wants his body. He decides it belongs to him.

Merab trains as a dancer in the Georgian National Ensemble. He has performed the same rigid choreography since childhood. The dance demands a hard, immovable masculinity that allows no softness. A new dancer named Irakli arrives and unsettles everything Merab has built. And Then We Danced uses the ensemble as a stand-in for a country that polices its men and punishes anything that bends.

Levan Gelbakhiani plays Merab with a body that says what his mouth cannot. He moves with a loose, fluid grace that the tradition forbids and that his attraction to Irakli unlocks. Bachi Valishvili plays Irakli as confident and evasive, a man who offers Merab everything and then retreats from it. Ana Javakishvili plays Mary, Merab’s dance partner and presumed girlfriend, with a quiet awareness of what is shifting around her. The pull between Gelbakhiani and Valishvili builds in glances and shared cigarettes rather than declarations.

Levan Akin writes and directs with a focus on the body in motion. He shoots the dance sequences in long takes that let Gelbakhiani’s transformation register without cutting away from it. The handheld camera stays close to skin and sweat and turns rehearsal into something physical and charged. Akin sets the traditional Georgian music against sudden bursts of pop, and the contrast maps the gap between who Merab is told to be and who he wants to be. The final dance is staged as a single sustained act of defiance.

And Then We Danced refuses to make Merab’s desire a tragedy. It treats his awakening as a source of power rather than shame. The film knows the world around him is hostile and records that hostility without flinching. It also insists that the dance is his and that no tradition gets to own his body. Akin builds the whole film toward that claim and earns it.