Not quite on pointe

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This article was published 28/06/2019 (2375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With a title taken from a Russian idiom for an outsider, this elegant but opaque fact-based drama centres on ballet star Rudolf Nureyev’s dramatic defection from the Soviet Union to France in 1961.

Like musical biopics, dance movies have their own clichés, which almost always involve setting up a conflict between technique and passion. Often there’s a dancer who is technically perfect but cold, and another whose skills are uneven but whose performance is all fire and emotion.

In The White Crow (in Russian, French and English, with subtitles), this trope is applied to the young Nureyev (played by Ukrainian dancer Oleg Ivenko). As a student of the Mariinsky ballet school in Leningrad, he is initially dismissed as clumsy and unteachable, and his restless, impetuous spirit is constantly chafing against the institution’s insistence on obedience, discipline and rules. This personal battle gets a geopolitical echo with a parallel between the promised individual freedom of the West and the rigidity of the Soviet regime.

Actor and director Ralph Fiennes (who was nominated for an Oscar for his work in Schindler’s List) and writer David Hare, the English playwright who has also scripted such films as Denial, The Reader and The Hours, get a little too stuck in this overdetermined paradigm. While The White Crow offers real pleasures for dance fans, it never quite captures the complexity of Nureyev as a man and artist, or the larger Cold War context of his defection.

The narrative is circular, cutting between Nureyev’s impoverished childhood near the Ural mountains, his early experiences at the school, his later debut as a professional dancer and his trips abroad. The vivid colour of his electrifying onstage performances is contrasted — a little too neatly perhaps — with the grim, grey, desaturated landscape of his upbringing.

Ukrainian dancer Ivenko shares some of Nureyev’s extraordinary beauty as a man and a dancer. Unfortunately, he’s a novice actor struggling with a very challenging central role. Nureyev could be selfish, arrogant and cruel, but he also had loads of charisma. Ivenko often comes off as merely sullen and petulant. Unable to convey his character’s insecurities and vulnerabilities — which are hinted at in the script — he can’t always hold our sympathy or even our attention.

Some of the supporting roles are effective. Fiennes himself (speaking in Russian!) plays Alexander Pushkin, a ballet master and a gentle melancholy cuckold, and Adèle Exarchopoulos is intriguing as Clara Saint, who looks like a cool, enigmatic girl from a French New Wave film and became a crucial part of Nureyev’s escape to the West. (She had connections to André Malraux, the minister of culture, and in 1960s France, people actually knew who that was.)

The dance scenes are well-crafted, not just the performances but the sequences in the rehearsal room, which suggest the punishing physical labour needed to convey ethereal grace.

There are other nicely detailed moments: a tiny Russian apartment crammed with lovely furniture; Parisian tables crowded with intense, smoky talking; a scene that demonstrates that the French police keep cognac on hand (you know, for emergencies).

The film — while suggesting that Nureyev was never interested in politics, only art — is at its best when it explicitly brings in the political. Ballet, after all, was caught up in the Cold War as a gorgeous but dangerous propaganda weapon: the Soviet authorities wanted to take their gifted companies to the West to show them off, but then had to risk their dancers’ exposure to such decadent bourgeois pleasures as Parisian nightlife and the company of French intellectuals.

Nureyev’s own conflicted loyalties culminate in a tense showdown involving his allies, the French police and some desperate Soviet minders, and Fiennes finally finds the drama that has been lacking.

Overall, though, that common dance-movie trope of technique versus passion applies to the film itself, which is handsome and correct in form but somewhat lacking, at crucial moments, in life and spark.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca