Friday Minute
No. 207 | January 14, 2011

Artful Steps

Our theme this week
Films about ballerinas

Featured this week
(See Monday post for theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Red Shoes (1948)
Wednesday    —   The Turning Point (1977)

Black Swan (2010)

You might expect a movie about a professional wrestler to be a hard-hitting, brutal affair.  You might expect a movie about the ballet to be lighter, more refined entertainment.  But you might be surprised to find the two films have a lot in common.  The movies:  The Wrestler and Black Swan.  Both feature performers driven by demons and other forces, who in the end make the ultimate sacrifice for their craft.  The two films are violent; the first is especially physical, the other, more psychological.  Both are directed by Darren Aronofsky, and both happen to be very good.

Art can be subtle, art can be obvious.  Black Swan is more the latter.  With a plot centered on a production of  Swan Lake, the imagery of black and white is as plain as in an old-time western.  The key, though, is not the virtues of one over the other, but the need for both.

Natalie Portman is Nina, a young dancer with a chance for the lead in her company’s new ballet.  Her technique is immaculate, and she’d be perfect for the role of the white swan, but in the view of her director, Thomas (a very good Vincent Cassel), she lacks the passion to perform the black swan.  The story follows her development from perfect, fragile girl to confident artist willing to let herself go.  The challenges she faces include Thomas, an imposing figure whose support can be frank to the point of abusive, and at times highly inappropriate; Lily (Mila Kunis), a new dancer with the company, who befriends Nina and loosens her up, but is a cunning rival; and Erica, her overbearing mother (a fearsome Barbara Hershey), a onetime dancer that stardom eluded, and the source of Nina’s considerable fears.

Aronofsky provides a detailed examination of Nina’s psyche.  At times the view is subtle, at times, fantastical, and even where the film goes over the top, I found the internal logic of the story and characters to be bulletproof.  To its credit, the film doesn’t take the easy way out.  It’s true to its own conceits.

This and the week’s other two films have a few similarities.  Black Swan‘s technique-versus-passion theme can be found in The Turning Point.  But Black Swan is closer to The Red Shoes.   Both have story-within-a-story elements, with the identities of a ballerina and her role merging in captivating and tragic ways.  The Red Shoes borrows from a fairy tale, Black Swan from the world of horror, and each tells a tale about a beautiful and talented ballerina that makes for a mesmerizing, unforgettable movie.

(More poster art for Black Swan here.)

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Black Swan (2010)
Darren Aronofsky, director
Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz, John J. McLaughlin, writers
Matthew Libatique, director of photography
Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Trailer

 

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Quote of note
“We all know the story.  Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan.  She desires freedom but only true love can break the spell.  Her wish is nearly granted in the form of a prince, but before he can declare his love her lustful twin, the black swan, tricks and seduces him.  Devastated, the white swan leaps of a cliff, killing herself and, in death, finds freedom.”
—Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), Black Swan (2010)

…58…59…60.

Wednesday Minute
No. 206 | January 12, 2011

Artful Steps

Our theme this week
Films about ballerinas

Featured this week
(See Monday post for theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Red Shoes (1948)

The Turning Point (1977)

The Turning Point made a big splash when it was released, but time is often the best judge of a film’s worth.  For The Turning Point, despite a pocket of loyal fans, time has not been particularly kind.  No film of the 1970s received more Academy Award nominations, but few film fans now would list it among the great films of that notable decade.  More likely, it’s remembered today for receiving eleven Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture and four for acting—then failing to win a single award.  (Only one other movie, The Color Purple, in 1985, matched that peculiar honor of going 0 for 11 on awards night.)

Director Herbert Ross had an active career during the 1970s and ’80s, making comedies (Play It Again, Sam, The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl) and dance-based music films (Pennies from Heaven, Footloose).  For Ross and his wife, producer Nora Kaye, both former dancers with the American Ballet Theater, The Turning Point was a film close to their heart.  If there’s anything the film does especially well, it’s the ballet.  The dancing is spectacular, and beautifully filmed, with more than a dozen selections from the popular repertoire.  Leading the effort are ballerina Leslie Browne and the incomparable Mikhail Baryshnikov, both dancers making their screen debuts and earning Oscar nominations for their supporting roles.

Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft play the leads, Deedee and Emma, two dancers who once were friends and rivals.  They meet again, twenty years later, having followed very different paths.  Deedee had a child, Emilia (Browne), and left the performing life to raise a family.  Emma made her name as a prima ballerina, winning nineteen curtain calls for one performance, followed by years of success.  Deedee remains jealous, having missed her chance, and Emma fears the end of the career for which she has sacrificed much.  The resentments of the two women simmer until they boil over into a full-blown cat fight outside Lincoln Center.  But it’s too too late to change the past, and the future belongs to the daughter, whose rise from teenage unknown to ballerina in a single summer is one storybook element in an otherwise reality-based drama.

The Turning Point has some virtues, but some shortcomings, too.  The acting is strong in spots, but uneven (the Oscar nominations for the supporting roles seem very generous).   The writing is unbalanced, with some half-drawn characters and a plotline involving Deedee’s son that’s left dangling.  Perhaps the most jarring problem is the disjointed nature of the dance scenes, which don’t flow from the rest of the action so much as interrupt it.

To its credit, though, The Turning Point is a movie about women who have the power to choose for themselves, unlike the week’s other films, in which authoritarian men rule the world of ballet.

In that respect, the film may be more contemporary, though to me it feels not as vital.  In The Red Shoes, a dancer must choose between love or art.  In The Turning Point, the choice is family or career.  The earlier film has a timeless quality; the later one feels less urgent.  No one dies in this one, but then, nothing seems worth dying for.

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The Turning Point (1977)
Herbert Ross, director
Arthur Laurents, writer
Robert Surtees, cinematographer
Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Leslie Browne, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tom Skerritt
Trailer

 

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Quote of note
Emma:  It didn’t work out.
Emilia:  Oh, so what?  He liked boys better than girls?
Emma:  Oh, not exactly.  He knew my priority was dancing.
Emilia:  Are you sorry?
Emma:  No.  I don’t believe in being sorry.  We are what we are.
—Emma Jacklin (Anne Bancroft), Emilia Rodgers (Leslie Browne), The Turning Point (1977)

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 205 | January 10, 2011

Artful Steps

Dance and dancers have been featured in many films, across a range of styles from ballroom to disco to street dance and more.  The movies themselves may be musicals or dramas or comedies or stories of romance, and often a combination of the above.  A small subgenre of dance film is the film about ballet.

Films about ballet are less about dance than about art, and about artists, and the choices and sacrifices made by artists in the pursuit of beauty.  These ballet films often blur the lines between reality and illusion, creating a heightened sense of the world inhabited by the artists, reflecting their psychology, their dreams and nightmares.

This week, let’s take a look at three films about ballet.  Each is the story of a ballerina, a talented dancer struggling to follow her dreams while contending with formidable forces around her.

Our theme this week
Films about ballerinas

The Red Shoes (1948)

The Red Shoes is the gold standard of ballet films, the towering achievement of the Archers—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—against which all other films of its kind are measured.

The title comes from an 1845 fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, about a girl who cannot stop dancing in her red shoes until finally her feet are amputated.  (Not the fairy tale ending you might have expected, eh?)  The Andersen story serves as the basis for the film’s centerpiece, a 16‑minute ballet telling the tale of a dancer who dances to utter exhaustion, at which point, once her red shoes are removed, she dies.  The film’s larger story follows dancer Victoria Page, played by ballerina Moira Shearer in her first screen role, as she rises from unknown to star of the Ballet Lermontov, dancing in the lead role of its new ballet, The Red Shoes.  Vicky’s fate is not unlike that of the dancer she portrays, and the story of the film, as with the story-within-the-story, is an allegory on the nature of ambition and the sacrifices demanded in the creation of art. 

Vicky’s answer to the question “What do you want from life?” is “To dance.”  That’s her passion and her talent, but she is confronted with choices to make between two powerful men.  One is the impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who spots Vicky’s promise in a performance of Swan Lake.  A Svengali-like figure, he makes harsh demands (“A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer”), but as Vicky’s mentor, he can assure her success.  Meanwhile, she falls in love with Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a composer who had joined the dance company at the same time.  When Lermontov and Craster have a falling-out, Vicky leaves the company with her lover, whom she then marries.  Later, in a meeting at Covent Garden, before opening night of the revival of The Red Shoes, the two men battle for Vicky, who is torn between the man she loves and the greatness that would be hers if she returns to dancing with Lermontov.  Her husband leaves, and seemingly out of control she chases after him, ultimately falling in front of a passing train.  Is it a case of suicide, or is it the red shoes she was wearing?

The film is notable for a number of reasons.  It’s a classic from the team of Powell and Pressburger, made in the middle of an extraordinary run of films, coming right after Stairway to Heaven and Black Narcissus.  The cinematography of Jack Cardiff, in brilliant Technicolor, is a feast for the eyes.

The filming of The Red Shoes ballet is worth mentioning.  Ostensibly the performance is a stage production, but some innovative film techniques help create an impressionistic effect, and we realize we’re not just watching a ballet anymore but more likely the dreamlike imaginings of its star.  It’s a rather magical sequence, one that’s been an inspiration for other films, among them An American in Paris and a film to be featured later this week, Black Swan.

The Red Shoes is a thing of beauty, a rare film about art that is a work of art in itself.

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The Red Shoes (1948)
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, writer-directors
Hans Christian Andersen (fairy tale); Emeric Pressburger (original screenplay), Keith Winter (additional dialogue); writers
Jack Cardiff, director of photography
Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer
Trailer

 

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The Red Shoes (1948)
Robert Helpmann, choreographer
Brian Easdale, composer
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor
Moira Shearer, Leonide Massine
The Ballet of The Red Shoes, Part 1

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The Red Shoes (1948)
Robert Helpmann, choreographer
Brian Easdale, composer
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor
Moira Shearer, Leonide Massine
The Ballet of The Red Shoes, Part 2

 

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Quote of note
Boris:  Why do you want to dance?
Vicky:  Why do you want to live?
Boris:  Well, I don’t know exactly why, but I must.
Vicky:  That’s my answer, too.
—Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), The Red Shoes (1948)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
Entr’acte | January 6, 2011

A Day at the Races

Tip for a sucker.

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A Day at the Races (1937)
Sam Wood, director
Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, George Oppenheimer, writers
The Marx Brothers — Groucho & Chico
Tutsi-Frutsi Ice Cream

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…58…59…60.

Tuesday Minute
Entr’acte | January 4, 2011

Animal Crackers

We interrupt this program for a few laughs.  (More features coming next week.  The new schedule is here.)

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Animal Crackers (1930)
Victor Heerman, director
George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby (play); Morrie Ryskind (screenplay); writers
Groucho Marx, Louis Sorin
Captain Spaulding:  “You go Uruguay, and I’ll go mine.”

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…58…59…60.