Dir. Frederick Wiseman, France/USA US , 2009, 159 mins
Cast: Emilie Cozette, Aurélie Dupont, Dorothée Gilbert
Review by Daniella Delaney
I'm a big dance fan - a regular at ENO and Sadlers Wells, I take classes three times a week and I have even battled my way right to the end of a particularly brick-like Rudolf Nureyev biography. But even so, I found this film pretty hard going and, coming as it does from acclaimed veteran documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, a disappointment.
Essentially what the viewer gets is 159 minutes of a fly-on-the-wall look behind the scenes of the Paris Opera Ballet. There's no narrative, no beginning, middle and end, just dance sequence after dance sequence plus a little about what goes on behind the scenes in the day-to-day running of an internationally acclaimed dance company.. If you're not a true balletomane and aren't familiar with which dance and which ballet is which, you're going to be none the wiser two hours later. Which is a shame, because I was really looking forward to this movie. It's the first serious mainstream dance film for some time and features the choreography of a host of ballet's most famous sons, including Wayne McGregor and the aforementioned Nureyev and I was hoping that this might be the film to finally bring ballet to the masses. Sadly though it's not.
It does though begin promisingly. For the first 20 minutes the viewer marvels at being up so close and revels in witnessing the concentration and total dedication that goes into perfecting some of the world's most famous ballets. The dance scenes are beautifully shot and for a while the ballet fan gets caught up and carried away by them. But the lack of any explanation or order of events means that gradually one dance scene starts to blend into another and your admiration gives way to an itching for the end credits. We learn nothing about the dancers themselves and the few scenes involving the administrators of the company are dull and could have easily been cut to make the finished result more palatable. There are a couple of glimpses of the eccentricities of a couple of the tutors, but that's the only feeling of human warmth you really bring away with you.
It would have been lovely to have seen some of the dances culminating in a performance or to have heard from the dancers at the end of each piece about how they thought it was all going. Even a few screen captions to tell you which ballet you were actually looking at might have helped. This is a beautiful looking film but a missed opportunity. Only venture out to see it if you're a truly dedicated ballet fan and have a very long attention span or a very well-padded behind. Or preferably both.
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