Butler's Cinema Scene

Oleg Ivenko as Rudolph Nureyev

“THE WHITE CROW” My rating: B-

127 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Early on in  Ralph Fienne’s “The White Crow” a character observes that Rudolph Nureyev’s dancing is rarely technically perfect but that he compensates with personality and passion.

Ironically, personality and passion are what is lacking in this biopic about Nureyev’s early life.

David Hare’s screenplay adopts a jumbled narrative that leaps between the dancer’s impoverished childhood in the Soviet Union during World War II, his training at Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet and a long visit to Paris that  ends with his defection to the West.

All the makings are here for a compelling real-life tale of an iconoclast (a “white crow” in idiomatic Russian) whose emotional makeup and outsized talent were a poor fit with the do-what-you’re-told culture of Soviet-sponsored arts (“Ballet is about obedience”).  And yet despite a few compelling moments, the film occupies a sort of generic middle ground.

Needless to say, the real Nureyev was anything but generic.

In the end the film’s successes and failures come down to leading man Oleg Ivenko, a dancer talented enough to simulate Nureyev’s astounding leaps (though dance scenes in the film are few and far between) but too limited as an actor to fully inhabit his character.

The film is bookended by the 1961 residency of the Kirov at Paris’ Garnier Opera House. Almost immediately Ivenko’s Nureyev is established as a loner who gets up early to visit the Louvre (just so he can have a few precious minutes of alone time with Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”) and insists on breaking away from the other Kirov members to explore the city’s vibrant night life with the young French dancers who are the Soviets’ hosts.

His willful flaunting of the rules does not go unnoticed; invariably he is tracked on his nightly perambulations by menacing KGB types who sit dourly at nearby tables sipping the house’s cheapest drinks.

Ralph Fiennes (left) as Alexander Pushkin

In the past we see Nureyev as a 17-year-old Kirov trainee. Even then he has a well-established sense of his own importance, rejecting the teacher assigned to him and lobbying to work under the more amenable Alexander Pushkin (director Fiennes, with shaven head and pot belly and delivering his dialogue in Russian).

Pushkin even opens his own home for Nureyev’s recuperation after a career-threatening injury, a bit of altruism that backfires when his much younger wife (Chulpan Khamatova) seduces the bed-ridden dancer.

Speaking of sexuality…the film matter-of-factly suggests Nureyev’s homosexuality and his relationship with a fellow Kirov dancer (Louis Hofmann). But let’s not call this a love affair; one suspects that the arrogant Nureyev’s one true love was Nureyev.

“The Black Crow” only works up a head of dramatic steam in its final moments.  Told that he’s being returned to the U.S.S.R. while the rest of the company continues on to London, Nureyev appeals to the airport police for political asylum, abetted by Clara Saint (Adele Exarchopolous), a young woman who befriended him on his stay.  Things come to a head as his Soviet chaperone (Konstantin Sergeyev) desperately shifts from cajoling to threatening to get the dance star to change his mind.

This is the point at which “The White Crow” ends.  There’s no mention of Nureyev’s successful career in the West, nor of his AIDS-related death in 1993.

However under the final credits we see old black-and-white footage of the real Nureyev in performance. These are worth sticking around for.

| Robert W. Butler