I do not know which is crazier – that I have not picked this film sooner or that it is twenty years old! My gosh – time surely does fly.

My pick for this week’s installment of Todd Mason’s ongoing series is 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, directed by Australian Baz Luhrmann and starring Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice. This ballroom dancing romantic comedy/drama was the first in Luhrmann’s “theater” trilogy – the other two films being Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge.

SYNOPSIS (Source: IMDB)

Scott Hastings (Mercurio) is a champion caliber ballroom dancer, but much to the chagrin of the Australian ballroom dance community, Scott believes in dancing “his own steps”. Fran (Morice) is a beginning dancer and a bit of an ugly duckling who has the audacity to ask to be Scott’s partner after his unorthodox style causes his regular partner to dance out of his life. Together, these two misfits try to win the Australian Pan Pacific Championships and show the Ballroom Confederation that they are wrong when they say, “there are no new steps!”

The film’s visual style is quite bold and brash, even if on a small budget. Fast forward 20 years later and looking ahead to Luhrmann’s latest project, an imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (which has been pushed back to the summer of 2013), gives you a proper glimpse as to what we can expect with this upcoming film.

Oh yeah, as with many Australian films, I really like the music!