Another Worldy

Another Worldy opens with "The Lucky Girls" dancing atop a New York City skyscraper to the music of an all-female band. Among the many other dancers whose performances Thornton appropriates, this troupe of young, professional female 1940s-era American dancers reappears throughout both versions of the film in seedy Algerian dives, Russian outposts and Parisian can-can establishments. A preternatural luck seems to take them everywhere in space and in time with infinite energy. Yet as their various world travels were most likely filmed on the same sound stage, they are like-wise emblems of a flimsy utopia. In this void, there is no sound, or rather, the original sound of the all-female band is replaced by a techno beat that uncannily seems to have belonged there all along, punctuating the regulated paroxysms of ultimate global unity--promised in the image but deferred through the never-resolving beat.