Summary

For a man clinging to the hope of an impossible love in an impossible world, Agustin Rejas (JAVIER BARDEM) would soon learn the bittersweet truth of self-fulfilling prophecy. For 12 years, the lawyer turned police detective, a decent yet dispirited man seeking to practice the law as it was intended, tracked a delusional anarchist who fancied himself the Fourth Flame of Communism behind Mao, Lenin and Marx. He called himself Ezequiel after the 6th Century Biblical prophet who preached doom for nations that did not adhere to God's law. From his obscure bloody pulpit in a volatile Latin American country, this Ezequiel (ABEL FOLK) excited the downtrodden, impoverished masses to execute his maniacal demands in the most brutal of ways, proving one man's revolution is another man's terrorism. The government's fascist regime would impose martial law and justice delivered by both sides would become equally ferocious and unjustifiable. Rejas would find solace in work that barely made ends meet but kept his sense of self-respect intact. He would find joy in his daughter Laura (MARIE-ANNE BERGANZA) and a certain comfort living a life of quiet desperation with his wife Sylvina (ALEXANDRA LENCASTRE), a determined bourgeois. He had relinquished love's passionate embrace for lasting fondness long ago. Then he met Yolanda (LAURA MORANTE). Laura's ballet teacher would represent all that Sylvina was not and all that rang familiar with Rejas' roots, a past he yearned to reclaim with a woman who, like Laura, had their country's passion in her eyes, its truth in her step. But Yolanda's truth would prove as elusory as Ezequiel's cause. In a nation torn asunder, Rejas would achieve his end by the most remarkable of means. But in achieving it, he would lose what he coveted the most. To this victor, spoils were but a shattered illusion. Based on Nicholas Shakespeare's adaptation of his critically acclaimed novel of the same name, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Lolafilms proudly present John Malkovich's directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs.