Movie Biographies: Nijinsky

1980 Biography

From Paramount Pictures

Directed by Herbert Ross

Starring

Alan Bates

George De La Peña

Leslie Browne

Alan Badel

Carla Fracci

Colin Blakeley

Jeremy Irons

Janet Suzman

Ronald Pickup

Mart Crowley

Director, former ballet dancer and choreographer Herbert Ross presented this film as a labor of love.  It is the second of his three ballet-oriented films.  It is a shame that it was not as warmly received as he would have liked.  I suppose I could have included it under the guilty pleasures banner except that I have no guilt whatsoever about liking it as much as I do.  I love biographies, whether in movies or books, and gay biographies set my heart a fire.  

Set in the 1910s at a time of great artistic experimentalism, Vaslav Nijinsky is in his early 20s.  He is the premier dancer and aspiring choreographer of Ballets Russes and the lover of Sergei Diagheliv, the company's controlling and fiercely possessive impresario.  Their jealousy-laden relationship takes a backseat to the entanglements of putting out opera seasons (there are subtitles to establish dates and locations) and Nijinsky's ever-growing desire to be more independent and in charge of his dances. 

The film is glorious in its presentation of the ballet which is woven seamlessly into the story lines...  the yummy La Spectre de la Rose, Petrouchka, Jeux and Sheheradzade  are among the offerings.  There is the dramatic impact of the disastrous premier of Stavinsky's Le Sacru du Printemps with Nijinsky frantically standing in the wings screaming out the beats to each measure to his dancer while the audience boos and departs.  Even more notable is his sexual  performance during Afternoon of a Faun which became the moment when the curtain started to drop on his 11-year career.

A focus of the story is a young Hungarian countess named Romola.  Pretty, demure and charming help mask that she is predatory and determined to marry him.  We're allowed to see the early designs she puts on him and we see she's not about to go about meeting him in a way that's not perfectly orchestrated at every level.  We don't necessarily dislike her.  Perhaps we're too busy being fascinated.

George De La Peña

He brushes off her first attempts but eventually she pounces when she's correctly assesses his vulnerability at a time when Nijinsky and Diagheliv are not getting along.  We wonder why he marries her?  Well, ok, to spite his lover, but still.  We've known all along that he's not well and marrying was the occurrence he did not need.

He was... and I admit I can't resist smiling as I write this... having a hard time dealing with his heterosexuality.   It gave him the final push.

My favorite scene comes just before he descends into madness.  She visits Diagheliv and asks him to take her husband back, not so much on the stage as in his arms.  It's a beaut.

The film opens and closes with the same scene... Nijinsky is sitting on the floor, a straitjacket tightly arranged, staring.  A scrawl across the screen advises he spent the last 33 years of his life in a sanitarium.  The greatest ballet dancer of his time died in 1950 at age 61.

With a critical eye fixed upon it, I cannot deny that the film is flawed.  For a biography, we learn virtually nothing about his years before becoming famous and we learn little about his eventual marriage which is key to understanding that time in his life.  I felt that Ross didn't dig as deeply as he could have.  

Nijinsky suffered a great deal of torment and I might have hoped that Ross would have scrutinized it better but instead the character comes off as more of a petulant brat.  The mental issues could have been plumbed more.  I detected no emotional arc which is crucial to this type of story.

The gay aspect is given short shrift which is especially odd given that Herb Ross is the director.  Maybe it's played a little too safely because the film was made in 1980.  I confess I want to see a story about real gay men acting a little gay.  They do the gay-men-in-ballet thing well but that's not what I mean.  I mean how about a little something that's loving and physical?  I could have handled it.  Not looking for soft-core porn.  What we get is a coupla shots of them kissing and even then it's with a handkerchief in between their touching lips.  A little too antiseptic for me...

As mentioned earlier, Ross did three films that dealt with ballet.  All three starred Leslie Browne, his real-life ballerina goddaughter, in the only three films she would make.  The first was The Turning Point in 1977 and then there was Dancers in 1987.  One can only wonder how different the film would have been had Ken Russell, who was once attached to the project, done it.

Browne is one of the things wrong with the film.  I hate to say it because I loved her in The Turning Point which earned her an Oscar nomination.  But for this story, at least, she just doesn't have the acting gravitas.

George De La Peña certainly impressed me as a dancer here.  He was a performer with the American Ballet Theater.  I'm guessing Ross must have persuaded him to try his luck in movies because he hired him as Baryshnikov's stand-in in The Turning Point.  And the director did first offer this role to Baryshnikov who declined.  De La Peña is not bad in the acting department and he throws a great hissy fit but his inexperience is easily detected.

Top-billed and worth it is Alan Bates as Diagheliv.  I love his movies and think this is one of his best acting jobs.  He just so easily sank into the character's superiority, smarminess and strength.  I loved how he was dressed and that shock of gray hair in the front and that wonderful face with volumes written on it.  What an actor.  I suspect that Bates sitting on the beach, dressed all in white and with that wide-brimmed hat, checking out the boys, was an homage to Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.  Nice.

Jeremy Irons commanded one's attention in his screen debut as Mikhail Fokine, a petulant artistic director who wants more control and runs afoul of both Nijinsky and Diagheliv.  Alan Badel in his final theatrical film as the effete baron who finances the company is also wonderful.  Frankly the largely British supporting cast were all on the mark.

Didja notice Mart Crowley's name above?  He was Natalie Wood's employee and BFF and the writer, at her nudging, of The Boys in the Band.  You can dazzle them with his tidbit at your next Hollywood-themed party.  Just put it in the form of a question...

The real Nijinsky

It wasn't difficult to go gaga over the sumptuous, well-mounted look.  The richly-detailed Edwardian sets, the costumes, the exquisite attention to period and the gorgeous color photography by Douglas Slocombe won't be easily forgotten.  It's also a lovely travelogue through  England, Italy, Hungary, France and Monaco.

It is a gorgeous tour through the lives of the rich, privileged and talented when eccentricity was king and art was everything.  The story is based on Nijinsky's diaries and a biography by his wife.

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