There was, in 1984, Footloose, a rousing film with a fitting title, starring Kevin Bacon as a light-hearted big city kid whose desire to dance was thwarted by the repressive policies of a small town. That could be characterized as a cultural discouragement.

Across the ocean, an 11-year-old boy in hard-scrabble coal country in Thatcher’s England whose desire to leap lively met with resistance in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, a swan story that could be seen as ethnic/sociological: Macho men and their sons don’t clothespin their life-careers to spandex pants and ballet toe shoes.

Now, leaping decades and continents, director Richard Raymond has enlivened a [true] tale of a real dancer from the troubled Persian religious topography in Desert Dance. Here, the stricture has more painful stakes than its dance-y forebears.  Iran, of course, forbids dance, avocationally or as a career path. The morality Basiji, on guard in the street and in the cafes, at schools and anywhere people congregate, are ever at the ready to apply their short-handled knives and long-handled truncheons to anyone who should think of stepping out of Islamic line.

Nazanin Boniadi stars as the jazz-dance-consumed dancer, Afshin Ghaffarian, and the delectable Freida Pinto (from Slumdog Millionaire, 2008) as his exquisite fellow dancer. Ghaffarian risks literally everything to found a dance company in his home country amid Iran's politically volatile landscape and the nation's permanent fatwa against dancing. The lovely Pinto and soulful Boniadi spoke of their lengthy dance training, buffing for their roles. 

A comforting inspirational treatment denies, as did the director himself to me, the extent of attendant horrors for those who dare to flout the dominant anvil of the oppressive mullahcracy. 

In a discussion after the NYC screening, director Raymond genially insisted the film “is not at all political, not the least little bit.” This is patently untrue, as the film does show the disputed and much-reported results of the tainted 2009 election, where brave Iranian youth strode the streets in green, banners high, fingers lifted in the two-digit salute of freedom. These many thousands were beaten, tortured, jailed, often murdered -- without a word of condemnation or acknowledgment by the Obama White House, shamefully condemning so many activists to death, and silent sympathizers to mute existences, as they witnessed the slaughter of their compatriots. We lost a golden opportunity, there. Among the many over the past nearly-seven years.

The film is, oddly, in English, rather than in Farsi. Again, the director explained that “the people of Iran already know the story, so why make the movie in Farsi?” Authenticity?

Despite the director’s careful protestations (were there members of the Basij in the West 40^th Street screening room? one halfway wondered), the reception afterwards was well-appointed, delicious, and there were zero arrests we noticed in the magenta-lit vaulted cavern of the downstairs cocktail lounge), which could be understood if he wished to have broader appeal to an audience uninterested in politics, but presumably interested in kinky toe-boots, Shia edition.

And while the story of the doughty underground dance troupe holds interest, and the dancing segments are both exotic and entrancing, it is also plainly evident -- the director, again, agreed with me about this -- the film prettifies the 75-million strong country of non-Arab Persia, prettifies the nastiness that attended the elections, prettifies the fight waged by the men and women involved, and showed miraculous recovery mere days after severe beatings.

No matter. Anyone with the slightest knowledge gets that the cast, crew and director were toiling under certain cautions, though the filming itself, Raymond confided, was accomplished out of country.

“Of the three countries we could have filmed in, one was Israel, but we thought that would have been too … provocative … under current circumstances. So we decided on Morocco.”

The hipness of the cast seemed a bit too provocative, too, but never mind. The film is instructive for the ancillary light it sheds on living under constant threat of arrest and manhandling for infinitesimal slights, for the dogged perseverance of the artistic spirit, and for the currency of its headline interest after Lausanne, hapless Sec-State Kerry and the ongoing onionskin de-layering of a “framework” for an “agreement” within a “possibility” that is as much Administration fantasy as it is la-la-reality.