Even given transparent formulas for box office success, it’s
curious how each filmmaker’s starting point holds out an argument of its own.
Ralph Fiennes, who directs and appears in “White Crow,” a film that collects
around the idiosyncrasies of ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, finds his in the
dancer’s “ferocious sense of destiny” and a desire to shoot dance sequences from
a different perspective.
Each viewer’s expectations cannot help but be conditioned by the dancer’s outsized
celebrity. In my case (full disclosure), I included Nureyev in my 2007 collective
biography “First Position: a century of ballet artists” (Praeger Publishers
2007). So I was looking forward to a visual replica of an emphasis on the
dancer’s development into a virtuoso. If you too were expecting something along
those lines, this may not be the film for you.
To solve the geographical and language problems posed by the actual story of
Nureyev’s life, Fiennes chooses, with each new expository scene, to start over
again from the point of origin. The first takes place on the Trans-Siberian
Express, the train on which little Rudik was born somewhere between
Kushnarenkovo and Ufa, a small village outside of Vladivostok. His mobile birth
prompted Rudi to joke not that there’s no place like home, but that there’s no
place called home, though he grew up in Ufa. The action shifts to Leningrad
(now Petersburg) where he trained at the Vaganova Institute and gained
notoriety as its resident enfant terrible. Then we follow Fiennes’ peripatetic lens
to Paris, where Nureyev defects while his white-knuckled friend Clara Saint
outwits the hovering NKVD-style school administrator Shelkov. There are moments when It can feel as if we’re
riding on the camera’s dolly, from Ufa to Leningrad to Paris and back again,
with each successive loop in a yarn in three languages, trolled out by
screenwriter David Hare.
The storyline is so labyrinthine that a recent online edition of Dance Magazine published a guide to the film, and reasonably so. Its author, Courtney Escoyne, writes that Fiennes admitted that he has “little interest” in ballet. He was moved to make the film by the challenge of shooting dance to achieve less of a flat “en face” look and more of an “écarté,” profile—that is, from an acute angle. This proved problematic, and dance sequences had to be shot several times over so as not to sacrifice the balletic aesthetic.
The result is a work of filmic craftsmanship offering a
narrow profile of Nureyev’s training and an even more scant glimpse of his
stellar career. In this thin version, temper tantrums, rude, self-serving
behavior, and just enough charm to grease the rails, gang up to sketch a
caricature of the artist.
Fiennes devotes much footage to Nureyev’s affair with Zenia (Xsana) Pushkin, the
wife of his teacher Alexander Pushkin (played by Fiennes), with insinuations
about Rudi’s homosexual orientation roughed in. Pushkin’s mentorship, expressed
in a patient yet imaginative teaching style, revered by all who studied with
him in real life, goes missing. Fiennes plays the teacher as a defeated,
spineless cuckold, inclined to fold in the face of bullying by the nomenklatura
in the person of the Stalinist hack administrator, Shelkov. Unfortunately, the
story ends with Nureyev’s defection, which in real life, is where it was just
beginning.
While the elements that provoked his defection were at play in the period the
film covers, there is so much more substance to the story of Nureyev—all of
which occurred after his defection, the exception being his early relationship
with the Cuban dancer Menia Martínez, which there is no trace of here. After
Nureyev defected, came the celebrated partnership he shared with Royal Ballet
of London star Margot Fonteyn, and others who were not as much of a target for
the paparazzi, but whose artistic merit added to Nureyev’s standing. Among them
were Maria Tallchief, Alicia Alonso, and Carla Fracci. His close, productive, and
yet fractious relationship with Danish Danseur Noble Erik Bruhn also took place
post-defection. How is it possible, in a period piece, to leave out Nureyev’s
having fallen victim to HIV-AIDS, or the appeal of music that led him to learn
conducting and conduct an orchestra, even while sidelined by the disease? It is
only possible if your focus is on the tawdry: his sexual encounters and Inspector
Clouseau-style defection.
The title “White Crow,” is more or less the Russian equivalent of Hans
Christian Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling.” It’s as if in his personal life, he is
the ugly duckling. The beautiful swan emerges only in the dance sequences,
where Ivenko is outstanding, but cannot rise to the daunting task of capturing
the virtuosic rakishness that Nureyev brought to the stage.
Though it’s hard to imagine that Fiennes, with his concern about the look of the film, would settle for a tabloid version of the character, yet in the end, that is what audiences are left with.
Toba Singer
