Girl Walk is a 75-minute film that follows three dancers across New York City. That’s it. No plot. No character development. Just lots of dancing, to some terrific mashup music by the artist Girl Talk. I thought this might quickly grow tedious or devolve into a repetitious music video, but first-time filmmaker Jacob Krupnick shows real flair. There’s a love not only for the dance and the dancers, but for the city of New York. There’s also a love of full body long takes, the kind you used to see in musicals before montage editing came in to cover up the flaws of unprofessional dancers.
Anne Marsen plays The Girl. Her style is big into messing around with the people and things around her like a big doofus. There’s a lot of skill and energy and very little grace. Sometimes she makes goofy faces, which is meant to be part of her joy of dancing. When she’s living in the moment she’s an amazing presence to watch. It’s a tough assignment for any actor, with some staged scenes, some seemingly done on-the-fly and some where you’re watching her behind-the-scenes (only not) trying to recruit strangers to join her.
The best dancer by far is John Doyle, who plays The Creep. Right from his intro, there’s a great fluid quality to his body movements that is matched by Krupnick’s fluid camera. The opening of “The Creep Takes New York” is the dance highlight of the film, and I wish he played more with the rest of the group. Finally, there’s Dai Omiya as The Gentleman who is solid, but ends up leaving a very small impression. With the other two you do sense a bit of a journey. They are making their way through the day with dancing highs and lows, but The Gentleman is more like the transition person that helps the day move along.
Krupnick stitches it all together. Sometimes he hides the transition from improv to staged, like the train car that turns out to be half full of other dancers or the hidden camera shopping spree that leads to one of Marsen’s more staged dances in an empty side street. There are long takes where you wonder how the dancers are hearing the music and edited bits where someone will perform the same dance in multiple locations. There’s always something new, like when The Gentleman smacks a woman’s drink and it turns into a dance battle, or the Chain Reaction scene towards the end of the film.
The last time I watched GW/AD in full was when we were coming out of COVID isolation. It was a joy to take this unique trip and to see a version of New York City so full of life, the opposite of social distancing. We need to keep small films like this alive in people’s minds. Despite the overall cheer, it’s not a film for everyone. Some people will get it and then be looking to move onto something else. There are definite nits to pick, personal favorite and less favorite scenes – I don’t like the performative dancing flowers at the cemetery – and it winds down towards the end spending too much time away from our three leads. However, there isn’t another film like it and the rewatchability is extremely high because there are many details to catch and its fun to imagine the personalities of the three dancers, both as characters and as artists.
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