Saturday, August 26, 2006

Film: Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opéra Ballet (Tout près des étoiles)

Don’t be put off by the Village Voice blurb on the cover that promotes (damns?) this Nils Tavernier movie as "A voyeur’s dream!" In actuality, it is an engaging, intelligent study of the Paris Opéra dancers as they rehearse and take class in April 1999. The film begins inauspiciously with a flight to Japan, where the company is touring, and where they are performing Maurice Béjart’s Ninth Symphony, which looks something like what you’d see at an Olympics half-time show. (When asked later on to "relate" [the term used in the subtitle; I couldn't quite hear what the French was] the ballet, he declines, but at least enlightens us by saying it’s not a ballet, it’s a "demonstration," meant to be performed in a sports arena. Well, that’s what it looks like.) However, what is most impressive about the film is not the bits of choreography that we see, but its presentation of the dancers as people who happen to be highly trained artists.

Tavernier achieves this by a series of probing interviews, interspersed among, and sometimes narrating over, the rehearsal shots. The dancers speak very candidly, as well as articulately and intelligently, about their careers, their training, their achievements, their disappointments. They are amazingly good natured (in contrast to the choreographers interviewed, Béjart and Jiri Kylian, who seem to say what will suffice and walk away, although Béjart is slightly more patient.)

These conversations with the adult dancers who’ve "made it" are contrasted at various points, with scenes, for example, from the school in Nanterre, which appears to have a lot in common with Marine corps boot camp, and with conversations with ever-hopeful understudies, who seem to have little to no chance of appearing on stage. Even lower in the hierarchy are the two girls who were trained at the Conservatoire, not in Nanterre, and are seemingly treated like second-class citizens. Company politics is thus engaged only obliquely.

Some moments really stand out: at the beginning, a shot of class, as the camera focuses on Manuel Legris in attitude, which seems to convey everything that’s wonderful about dancing; the two girls whom the camera comes upon as they are rehearsing the "fiancée" parts in act 3 of Swan Lake; they sheepishly explain that they hope to get a shot at the part, but seem ashamed to have their ambition uncovered; a class at the school, where a little girl is being given corrections by her teacher and then harshly chided for not working hard enough; she sucks it up; the girl who happily announces to the interviewer that she just found out a week ago that she was pregnant; the very skinny young girl who is told by the seamstress that she has no tutu, and will have to find one to wear from a girl who’s not dancing that day. Moments such as these provide a multi-sided view of how the dancers negotiate this world of heightened pleasure and pain.

The film is frequently frustrating in that it sometimes doesn’t identify the speakers, or doesn’t identify them often enough. Too often it falls into the trap of focusing on a sweating dancer’s back for 30 seconds while ignoring the pas de deux that’s being performed a few feet away; or, when it does turn to the pas de deux, the camera focuses on someone’s fingers. Legs and feet are often omitted from view. Film people may not mind these things, but dance people will. We also see too much of people applying make-up. The constant shifting from a scene to a black and white still photo is also somewhat disconcerting (at first I thought it was meant to compare or contrast an historical image with the current moment, but no; perhaps the filmmaker is looking to contrast the living art with the static image?). But these things are not so annoying as to detract from enjoying the film. In seeking to cover the arc of a career, its dénouement includes a farewell performance, that of Elisabeth Platel in La Sylphide. After the performance she delivers a stoic, tearless farewell speech. The film ends with a performance of Swan Lake; the exhausted swans run into the wings at the end of the fourth act, grab their bags and water bottles, and head for the exit. We know what lies ahead for them. Yes, see it.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good to see another post from you. I suppose this film is showing at a New York theater? (Remember, you may have readers elsewhere in America and even elsewhere in the world.) Your mention of the Village Voice is enticing for only one reason--maybe whatever they wrote will give some background on the filmmaker. I see from his entry at IMDB.com (http://imdb.com/name/nm0851731/) that he has a film dated this year titled Aurore. Something to do with Sleeping Beauty perhaps?

BTW, something funny is happening to your apostrophes on my screen.

3:24 PM  

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