‘The Business of Fancydancing’ offers a piercing look at a complicated life

In Sherman Alexie’s new feature film “The Business of Fancydancing,” which plays at 7 nightly through Thursday, Aug. 29, at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, the main character is a Spokane Indian homosexual poet who returns to his reservation for the funeral of a childhood friend. Throughout the 103-minute story, these elements of his personal history collide to portray a man whose life has been marked by both magic and loss.

Alexie is best known as a novelist and short-story writer but became known to the film world with the 1998 hit “Smoke Signals,” which was adapted from his stories. He also has written and directed “The Business of Fancydancing,” in part as a response to his experience with the film industry the first time round. He was determined this time to control all creative and technical aspects of the production, which is no easy task in the mighty film world.

As a result, “Fancydancing,” which had a budget of less than $100,000, is a digital video that capitalizes on home-movie textures and an unpolished, though affecting, acting style. The scenes – or stanzas, as Alexie calls them – move slowly, like a meditative work of fiction. The pace can be overly slow at times, but Alexie forces viewers into the narrative, in part because it feels so intimate and insider. Indeed, a certain insider status is at the heart of this film.

“In creating ‘The Business of Fancydancing,’ we adapted a tribal, sovereign and literary mode of making feature films,” Alexie said. By doing so, the cast and crew have been able to share in the profits of what he calls “a tribally inspired collaboration of art and capital.”

One of the themes in the film addresses a similar relationship between Indian life on the rez and Indians in the commercial marketplace. Seymour Polatkin is the film’s central character and a poet whose upbringing on the reservation forms the basis of his work. He constantly teeters between the pain of his past and the mainstream success and popularity he has as a result of writing about it. He is split in his allegiances, but ultimately finds the reservation imprisoning.

His allegiances as a gay man are not split but they are challenged by his love for Agnes Roth, a part-Indian, part-Jewish woman who was his first girlfriend in college. They struggle to find a fulfilling way to love each other once sex is no longer a possibility between them.

Seymour’s relationship with his best friend, Aristotle, is far more aggressive because the reconciliation has to do with territorialism, masculinity and the mercenary fashion in which Seymour has marketed Aristotle in his poetry.

Most of the film is shot in the Seattle area and on Alexie’s reservation and is interspersed with studio shots of stylized Indian dancing with rich emotional range and visual grace. Musical accompaniment is nearly constant and consists of familiar work, such as spirituals, and original back-porch music as well as haunting a cappella pieces. Because of Alexie’s own work as a writer, the film is sensitive to the act of writing as well as the presentation of poetry.

Since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January, “The Business of Fancydancing” has picked up a number of festival awards, primarily for writing and audience response. It’s a piercing look into Indian life, gay life, grief, loss, ritual and at the universal questions: Can you ever go home? And does love have the power to heal?