Rhapsodies

This week I decided to touch on films about Ballet. My feeling about ballet is mixed. Half the time I regard it almost more of a sport than an art form and judging a lot of the incredible things the dancers are doing up on the stage on points.
Though one thing I’ve found to be consistent in a lot of films is that most of them focus on the the obsessive dedication and scrifice it takes for the art to work.

The first film on my list, The Black Swan (not to be mistaken for the pirate film I watched a couple of months ago.) by Darren Aronofsky, tells the story of Nina ( Natalie Portman) an aspiring, but very sheltered, ballerina, living with her domineering mother, who after years as a background dancer finally gets the chance to be the lead in Swan Lake

The problem is that she is expected to perform the duel roles of the White swan and the black swan and while she is perfect for the role of the demure white swan she has trouble giving herself to her inner urges that the role of the black swan requires. To make matters worse when a new outgoing dancer, Lilly (Mila Kunis) arrives who dances the role of the black swan perfectly. Now it has turned into a competition and the pressure is getting to Nina.

This was an interesting and challenging film that I frequently found difficult to watch. The thing I found interesting were the deliberate parallels to this film and Swan lake. Along with the obvious, Nina as the White Swan, Lily as the black, we also have the director, (played with wonderful smarminess by Vincent Cassel) who fills the role of the Magician Rothbart trying to transform Nina into his newest “Little Princess”

And behind all of this we are shown the underside of the ballet world with ballerinas clawing there way to the top in a feild that chews them up and spits them out and (in this case) dying for your art is quite literal.

The next film on my list was The Red Shoes by Michael Powell. It’s about a dancer, Vicky Page played by Moira Shearer), who has just joined  the prestigious Ballet Lermontov run by Boris Lermontov (played by Anton Walbrook) a driven perfectionist who is driven by the desire to create the perfect performance. She quickly grows to become the company’ lead dancer for their brand new ballet, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Red Shoes. But when she falls in love with the ballet’s composer Julian Craster (played by Marius Goring ) she is forced to choose between her artistic career and true love.

This movie deserves all of the acclaim it has been getting for years the dance and the performances. The best bit about it though is the Red Shoes Ballet itself standing out in the center of the film as a wonderful fifteen minutes of pure fantasy. In the process it nails down Anderson’s metaphor of the red shoes as something personally destructive that you can’t give up