I found the premise of the movie quite mystifying.
Why would a kid that age get into ballet and not video-games or violent manga cartoons? Maybe I can't access my female side at all! The most I could figure was that he was trying to break out of the conventionality of his depressed little Northern English town, and wanted to get away from the violent nature of boxing reminscent of the anger of the Miner's Strike of 1984.
Even so, it went beyond a statement of rejection of violence, as the review says, getting to a deprecation of men and men's culture.
A brief scene at the end shows Billy Elliot as an adult in a national ballet company, and his extreme get-up makes you wonder whether all this ballet turned him gay himself! Billy earlier actually rejected the advances of his young girlfriend, who wanted to expose herself to him, so that's hinted. Is this the final success men should be hoping for, to look like a Christmas tree ornament and possibly even turned off women? I laughed. Certainly there's at least 1-1/2 "burning bras" in this odd story.
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