Word: nureyev
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film consists of segments from four of the Royal Ballet's repertoire, each a pas de deux featuring Nureyev and ballerina. La Sylphide, with Carla Fracci and The Sleeping Beauty, with Lynn Seymour, are both classical works. Field Figures, with Deanne Bergsma, choreographed by Glen Tetley, is a modern ballet. And Marguerite and Armand, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton especially for the pair, is based on Dumas's story of Mme. Recamier, the courtesan immortalized by Garbo in Camille. Ashton calls his ballet an "evocation poetique," but it is more like sentimental prose. The other pieces...
...pieces of formal works are strung together by clips of Nureyev rehearsing, Nureyev exercising, Nureyev resting, Nureyev breathing. And the entire movie is narrated with Nureyev and Fonteyn's words interspliced) by Briton Bryan Forbes, intoning as though he were touring Stonehenge, from a script with such penetrating insights as, "dancing is very difficult, you know", or "this is a dancer's dressing room; no frills, just four bare walls...
...Nureyev's personality goes, it's the same old story about how hard-working and attentive he is, how eager to innovate, how much the heart-throb of the ballet world in shots of his ogling fans, almost all of them are teeny-boppers or middle-aged women). Fonteyn begs the question of Nureyev's temper: "superficially he might seem to have some bad sides, but I don't think they're important." I can understand that the makers of the film might have been hesitant to pry uninvited into Nureyev's private affairs: if his reputation...
...audience), and the camera is placed so close to the dancers that any illusion of reality is lost. As a result, in La Sylphide about a Scottish lord who falls in love with a wood nymph), as the camera glides coyly behind a plastic bush and peers out at Nureyev in white lipstick and kilt, nostrils flaring, the effect is more like a parody of Brigadoon than serious, classical ballet. In The Sleeping Beauty, it is grossly unfair to Lynn Seymour that the camera is close enough todistract the audience's attention from her accomplished performance tothe fact that...
...enough that the audience is practically sitting in the performers' laps, the unified effect of dancing bodies is constantly being interrupted by close-ups of bits of anatomy--a thigh or a wrist, even a set of armpits. And, for a touch of glamor, there are artistic effects, like Nureyev divided into six images, all kicking each other in the head. This kind of overbearing camerawork is an insult tothe efforts of the performers and to the intelligence of the audience...