I was with acrobat friends yesterday who know I dabble in movies, they wanted to share some of the finest spectacle, recommending this as good introduction, and I'm always interested in movies about dance of every sort, from ballet to martial arts. So we sat down and watched this.
The bad news. The director all but ruins the show. The camera swoops and circles as in a concert film, there is dramatic cutting, slow-motion, even replays of some of the action. Can you imagine? He edits in mid-air between leaps. And cinematic rearranging of space simply negates what these people can do, which is that they are actually doing it in real time, a single impossible flow. And he makes it seem more ordinary than it is. One of the acts is two astronaut mimes move in slow-motion, but the magic fizzles out when the filmmaker shoots in the next segment in slow-motion.
To my surprise, none of my company even noticed this was a problem.
But what goes on on that stage is most of the time pretty great—barring some repetitive gymnastics in the end. I was in awe of the trapeze artist who stacks chairs one on the other fifteen feet high to light a chandelier that is being pulled from him higher and higher. The most thunderous applause in the hall was for the two stuntmen on bicycles, a lesson that something impresses much more when you have a notion of it than when it is abstractly impossible.
But what contrasting feelings when you are the passive observer of a show. You know some of the acts have been years in the making. You know rigorous training has gone into it, a passion and love for dancing and flying. You know it miraculously works because of all the times it didn't.
And all that has been condensed to a three minute act, and then on to the next to entertain. And it made me feel bad, because I recognize the effort, yet gorging on it like this one after the other, diminishes each artist having mastered his body, the preciousness of it. It made me think of Greenaway's Cook, Thief, Lover.
This is fine for an hour, surely impressive but lacks the narrative backbone to carry it, it is a bit sketchy.
But I'd much rather see a film about the life inbetween acts, the acts themselves but also the sort of nomadic living that goes on the edge of things, about the falling down of it, taut tethers and what orbits pull them back up again. There's a film I'd like you to see called Ballets Russes.
