Word: ballerina
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...theme of Nijinsky's fatigue with a decadent life remains sketchy, and the script in general botches character development. After painstaking suggestions of Nijinsky's growing interest in the opposite sex--he asks Diaghilev to describe what sleeping with women is like, indulges in a lengthy kiss with a ballerina--the film presents his marriage to Romola as hysterical revenge on his mentor...
...film contains a rather guarded performance by Alan Bates as Diaghilev and an ill-considered one by Leslie Browne, the young ballerina in Director Ross's The Turning Point. She is here both glum and insipid as she pursues not an ambition but a man. A young dancer from the American Ballet Theater, George de la Pena, acts the part of Nijinsky quite effectively. There is a certain ineluctable spirit about him. But of his dancing, strangely, nothing at all can be said: Ross never permits him to per form a complete sequence of a ballet. In one instance...
...more successful scene, the chorus girls dance as dolls, while Beth Saidel performs a dance solo as a ballerina lost in a sea of mechanical people. At the end of the number they "heil Hitler"; the ballerina gives up and joins them. Although the concept of the flitting dancer seems a bit hackneyed, it clarifies the action for the audience...
Most of all she laughs at herself. At 34, she is not a pretty woman, but she turns even that to advantage. Some of her jokes are about her ample breasts: "Two of the reasons why I did not become a ballerina." A couple are about the rest of her body. Sitting down, she notices that her upper arm is still moving when the rest of her has stopped. She jiggles it and -incredible sight-her thighs, legs and neck too. "Isn't it terrible," she sighs, "that when you hit 30, your body wants a life...
...like that of a head porter in a hotel. 'Give me the scissors, Grigoriev!' Diaghilev exclaimed. He cut away the collar, to make a wide V-neck. He cut away the velvet, till it barely covered the buttocks. Nemtchinova had never shown so much leg before (what ballerina had?) and she protested. 'I feel naked!' 'Then go and buy yourself some white gloves!' said Diaghilev. The celebrated white gloves became almost a part of the choreography...