First Position (Wednesday, May 9, 2012) (46)

Yet another documentary about amazing things cute kids do... Oy vey! Yes, First Position shows how teens (and pre-teens) from around the world compete in an annual New-York-based ballet competition to get scholarships to some of the premiere ballet theaters of the world. 

You have your high-strung girl from California who is pushed harder and further by her Japanese mother, your young American boy, the son of an American Naval officer based in Italy, who now trains in Milan, your affable teen adopted by Philadelphians from her home in war-torn West Africa who is fighting to disprove the industry concept that black women don't have the body shape to be ballerinas. It's all very sweet with tons of built-in drama based on the inevitable falls, injuries and egos. 

Most annoying about the film is that what director Bess Kargman shows us is mostly what she has access to. The fact that she focuses on these kids is because they are the best in their relative age groups and divisions, so their success is relatively guaranteed. That we only see one competition is simply a matter of it being the one that she was allowed to shoot. That the competition we see seems to jump around through the various rounds in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing way, is only a matter of the end (their ultimate success) being more important than their stories.

It's all a bit too banal for my taste. This really isn't an examination of kids who do ballet or the weird world of junior ballet (the crazy schedule, the weird diets, the psychological trips the kids must go through), but rather an small glimpse of these few, hand-selected dancers for this short period of time. 

This is a nice movie, but nothing really special. It's probably more worth it for dancers to watch and reminisce about their youth than it is for dancing novices like me.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Black Swan (Saturday, December 4, 2010) (152)

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is not at all the film that I expected it to be (I guess that's why you go to the movies...). I was thinking it was a rivalry story of two young women, one on top and one as up-and-comer who are fighting for dominance. This is not really that at all.

The story revolves around Nina (Natalie Portman), a humorless young dancer in a New York City ballet company. She has been stuck in the middle or high middle of the troupe for a few years and is trying to catch her big break. She lives with her very over-protective mother... oh, and she's fucking nuts. She has hallucinations from very early on in the film, some are bloody, most are shocking. She ignores these visions and tries to continue on with her life.

As the new season is about to open the director of the company Thomas (pronounced "Tow-maaahhh", of course) (Vincent Cassel) announces that the show they will be doing is Swan Lake... but that he has some new ideas for it (or something). Nina main rival in the auditions is Lily (Mila Kunis) a hot new dancer who came to New York from San Francisco (how mysterious!).

Nina gets the role, but struggles with the emotions and sexuality that Thomas wants her to put into the role, because she is such an uptight drone. He shows her Lily dancing and says she should be more sexual like she is. Mostly from this point, we see Nina struggling with her slow decent into deep schizophrenia. She sees scary things jump out at her and speak to her, she sees herself growing wings or something, she sees herself having a lesbian tryst. She struggles sorta with a rivalry with Lily, but this is never really fully fleshed-out.

The film is basically about a girl going from pretty crazy and very tightly wound to more crazy and more tightly wound. There isn't a lot of development. She's never really warm or very interesting and never totally sane. This isn't really an interesting character development or plot. The dancing stuff is just the frame around the psycho-drama - it's not really about dancing at all. She could be a college student or a girl with a job on Wall Street. Mostly the dancing is just showy and an excuse to see Natalie in tight clothes (which is kinda gross when she so super skinny).

But this isn't really a psycho-drama in the sense of Bergman's Personal or Hour of the Wolf. This isn't about how she's going from sane to insane or how she's insane and doesn't know it, but we know it. This is about a girl who knows well that she's crazy and denies it. The only sorta inverse dramatic irony that Aronofsky gives us is that she knows she's crazy and we don't know until the third scene of the first act (and, by the way, that reveal is way too early). That's not interesting.

Why couldn't Nina have been a girl in the job of her dreams struggling physically with the work, but fighting to make it right who slowly goes crazy? I guess that would be more banal, but it would have worked better as an interesting narrative.

Aronofsky's aesthetic is totally lazy here. Everything is cold and dark (get it?!) and moving between lots of white and lots of black (get it?!). He also uses a shit-ton of mirrors to remind us of the duality of life and the split in Nina's psychology. It's so fucking heavy handed it's hard to watch. I would like this if it was a bit more Brechtian - and he was commenting on the dullness and heavy-handedness of the style. Instead we get nothing but earnest triteness. (N.B. This is not an arch attempt at farce or sarcasm, the way Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls or Starship Troopers were. There is no evidence to suggest Aronofsky is anything but totally serious about what he's presenting to us. If there's a wink in there, it's invisible. If this is a joke, it failed miserably.)

There is also a lot of waste, excess and fat in the script and some really horrible dialogue. One of the sub-stories here is that there is an older dancer, Beth (Winona Ryder), who is near the end of her career and struggling with addiction, depression and the loss of her physical talents. She tries to commit suicide (off-screen, so we don't really give a shit) and ends up in the hospital. There's a thing where Nina is so in love with her dancing, that she steals small things from her (a lipstick, a pack of cigarettes). I think this is supposed to mean something deep, but it just comes off as silly waste. This thread is never developed much and doesn't really connect to Nina's own psychology (she might be schizto, but she's also a lover of art! Who cares?!).

Considering the film is from Nina's point of view, and it is well established that her view is sick and not true, most of what we see onscreen is questionable and hard -to-believe. We cannot say that anything really happens or anyone really exists. I have strong feelings that the whole Lily character is just a figment of Nina's psychosis and doesn't exist. We only see her when Lily sees her and she seems to be a total psycho foil for her. She also, curiously, doesn't have a last name, when all other characters do. This is sorta interesting, but not really. It doesn't add anything to the story, but is just a flashy tidbit.

What Aronofsky lacks in intrigue, he makes up for in cheap surprises and gags. If a character turns around, odds are there's someone spooky lurking behind her. BOO! This is not filmmaking. This is simple and works the same when your 6-years old as when your and adult. This doesn't make me feel any different about Nina or her situation.

I should say that the Black Swan dance sequence at the end of the film is actually remarkably well done, very cinematic and beautiful. Well done on that part, Darren.

I think this story was simply badly conceived. I think it is a piece that could conceivably look nice (although I wasn't moved by the look), but the story and script were messy and it never was able to get over that. The acting is very OK (Cassel is terrible, Kunis is forgettable for the 20 minutes she's onscreen, Portman didn't have much to work with). This is a bad movie.

Stars: .5 of 4

La Danse - Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris (Saturday, November 2, 2009) (176)

Frederick Wiseman has made a career of very interesting documentaries with a clinical, dispassionate style. In this film he spends a few months with the Paris Opera Ballet company showing an 'all-access' look at the troupe's creative and administrative process. This is a long film, to be sure - 160 minutes long - but it does not drag much and keeps our interest throughout pretty well.

Wiseman's style is consists of setting a camera in a room and recording what goes on in front of it. There is no commentary and no particular 'director's voice'. It is documentary filmmaking in the Maysles model. It is as pure a document as one can imagine.

Much of the film shows the dancers rehearsing their routines with their choreographers and creative directors. We see at least six different numbers (maybe more - I might have lost track of a few of them) from their early stages through their final productions on stage. The rehearsal spaces, in the cupola of the old neo-Baroque Paris Opera theater, are themselves something wonderful to behold. But more than that, it is fascinating to see how the choreographers work on the most subtle movements of the dancers to change the entire tone of a work.

In addition to the artistic side, we also see the business and management side of things. We see Brigitte Lefèvre, the creative director and force of nature that has her hand in every part of the company from casting to fundraising. She's a tough lady, but clearly brilliant and totally respected by everyone we see (of course they have to respect her on camera because they would be cut if they didn't). In one scene, we see the development committee talking about an event for the 'American Friends' of the ballet, organizing events for the $5,000 and $25,000 donations. (Unintentional laughs result from a comment about Lehman Brothers executives giving money. Ooops!)

Wiseman gives us a glimpse of almost every small part of the production and every small support department. We see a guy vacuuming the boxes and cleaning the aisles of the orchestra, we see the costume designers working on upcoming shows, we see the cafeteria where administrators and dancers eat lunch side by side, we see the union labor discussions. It's all rather fascinating.

What I find especially interesting is the fact that this movie, which really has no particular 'point-of-view' and no directorial 'voice', feels rather strange because of it's nonchalance. That is to say that the film works as a mirror on the current documentary films and how nearly everything I have seen recently has a specific slant - and much of it being outright polemic. When faced with a film like this one, the *unbiased*, document-ness of it feels rather uncomfortable. Am I that corrupted by contemporary directors and their opinions?

For me, this is as much a formal exploration as it is a cinematic experience. The film is basically one scene after another with very little (other than some general chronology) linking one moment to the next. I think one of my frustrations with it is that ends rather abruptly - but it would be impossible to know how else to end it, I guess. It is as if the film is counting upwards with scenes - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. - moving easily from one thing to another. That it ends, say, on 25, rather than 20, is totally fair.

It does bring to my mind similar frustrations I had with Christo's mega-installation The Gates in 2005. That was also a formal exercise, I think. It's scope was breathtaking, but it's execution was sometimes mysterious and hard for me to follow. I had trouble with the fact that the individual gates were different in size and strangely varied different in distance from one to the next. This might have been part of a greater scheme, but to me, it felt too random and unfulfilling.

I get the same general feeling from this film. I recognize it as a beautiful work of art, but there are some editing and pacing decisions that don't totally make sense. But they don't make sense on a more fundamental level than a spot level. That is, I think there might be a big design that Wiseman has for the structure of the picture, but I can't see it and don't know what it is. I can say that I want to know more about the precess and the thinking behind the film - and hope there's more to learn.

I think this is a very beautiful and interesting movie. It might be a bit too long for casual viewing, but it probably is not a film that should be casually viewed. It is might be a bit too serious - but that's the point, I guess. (Like saying a war movie is too bloody or too violent.)

Stars: 2.5 of 4