how does someone get paid to make a film with so little substance?

toddbradley

I'm a big aficionado of ballet, and an even bigger fan of film. I especially love documentary film. So as far as I can tell, I'm totally in the target audience sweet spot for this film. And I really wanted to love this film, which - if you haven't figured out by now - is a very intimate look at part of one season of the Paris Opera.

But the film left me cold. Not only that, but it left me bored. And it left me wondering how any film director can get funding to make a film that takes such little effort and creativity.

This film is done without narration. Not only that, but it's done without any semblance of a narrative thread. From what my date and I could tell, the film makers shot footage of various events happening within the ballet - rehearsals, lessons, meetings, lunch, painting - over the course of several months. Then, they randomly selected scenes from all they shot and just pasted them together into a film. There's no sense of continuity, no sense of a story.

There are so many interesting topics that a long documentary film like this could try to address. How does being a top dancer affect your body over time? What do these dancers do when they're not rehearsing? Do they have families? Hobbies? How does a choreographer that only speaks English get a job here when some of the dancers don't understand English? The film doesn't try to answer any of these. Instead it focuses only on what's right in front of your face right now. There is setup after setup, without any payoff. There's a scene showing a difficult meeting regarding retirement benefits for the dancers, due to union negotiations going on. And then the topic is completely dropped, without another word about the union mentioned for the rest of the film. There's a scene where a dancer is complaining that she's being asked to do too many performances and she can't keep up because she's not 25 anymore. And then we never hear about it again.

By the end of the film, I was just wondering how the director chose which scenes to put in and which to leave on the editing room floor. And there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, from the viewer's perspective. That's why I think the director just selected scenes at random. Maybe putting together a film like this takes some really advanced skill. But to me, it looked like any film student with a decent camera and a lot of time could have made this film.

score 3/10

toddbradley 5 January 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2186693/