After being revealed to the general public in “Killers of the Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese, Lily Gladstone is back in a new moving and intense film, available on Apple TV+.
What does it talk about ?
Since his sister’s disappearance, Jax has been caring for his niece Roki and trying to make ends meet on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation in Oklahoma. She spends most of her free time searching for her missing sister, while helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow.
At risk of losing custody of Jax to his father, Frank, the duo hit the road to find Roki’s mother in time for the powwow. What begins as a search soon becomes a much deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Indigenous women across a colonized world and at the mercy of a broken justice system.
After Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone returns in a poignant new role
A major film of 2023, Killers of the Flower Moon allowed Martin Scorsese to deliver an epic western that revisited a dark part of American history: the series of murders of members of the native American Osage tribe in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s.
If the director brought together two of his favorite actors – Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio – he also revealed to the general public Lily Gladstone in the poignant role of Molly Buckhart, Native American from the Osage community and wife of Ernest Burkhart, who will fight for her tribe, victim of a series of abject murders.
With this powerful character serving as the heart of the story, Lily Gladstone delivers a brilliant performance that earned her a historic Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. This role anchored in her flesh has also allowed her to shine a light on the indigenous community, where she comes from and which she has supported since the start of her career.
Her new film Fancy Dance, available today on Apple TV+, is part of this desire and allows us to extend the experience of Killers of the Flower Moon according to Lily Gladstone:
“It set the stage beautifully for when Fancy Dance needed to find a distributor and it found its way to Apple after Killers of the Flower Moon came out. And there were all these voices of people wanting to know about it. more about the story of the sisters, who wanted more from Molly’s point of view.”
Apple TV+
Because Killers of the Flower Moon and Fancy Dance share similar themes and echo each other. Lily Gladstone draws parallels between the two characters she plays – Molly on one side and Jax, living on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation in Oklahoma, on the other – who are two strong women grieving the loss of their sisters and who try to survive in an unfair and violent male world.
If Martin Scorsese’s feature film was intended to be a large-scale epic fresco, Fancy Dance for its part is a more intimate drama which focuses on an oppressed matriarchal family.
“It’s the same land a hundred years later, and some of the issues are no different. These two stories support each other, they contextualize each other, and it’s a continuation of everything Killers of “The Flower Moon allowed for indigenous representation, and I think it prepares audiences well to see Fancy Dance.”
Apple TV+
Presented last year at the Deauville American Film Festival in France and the Sundance Film Festival in the United States, Fancy Dance is finally available to the general public on Apple TV+. And you would be wrong to miss it, especially if you liked Lily Gladstone’s performance in Killers of the Flower Moon.
In this film – Erica Tremblay’s very promising first great achievement – Lily Gladstone touches the heart once again with her interpretation of a courageous aunt “another mother” torn between the investigation into the disappearance of her sister and envy of a better and secure future for her niece Roki, played by the young but talented Isabel Deroy-Olson.
Because this new performance by the actress is much richer and much denser. Very liberated and instinctive, Lily Gladstone gives herself completely in this very well-articulated, hard and intense family drama, which finds its luminous and sublime breaths in the sequences of sorority, community and dance, particularly in the final sequence which transcends and liberates its characters.
Interview by Mégane Choquet on June 17, 2024.
The film “Fancy Dance” is available on Apple TV+ via the platform, and via myCANAL.
