After unexpectedly strong critical & commercial success dramatizing ballet (on-stage & off) with THE TURNING POINT/’77 (come for the bitch-fest; stay for the dance), married power-couple Herbert Ross & Nora Kaye (director; producer) went a step & a half deeper on this much less well-received bio-pic of Nijinsky, the legendary Russian dancer/choreographer whose meteoric career ended in madness.* Book-ended with a pair of missteps (Nijinsky’s INVITATION TO THE DANCE intro uses needless camera tricks which lessen rather than heighten the experience, and an ending montage with b&w stills from the film when you expect archival shots of the real Nijinsky), almost everything in-between is both better and far more accurate than you expect it to be. As Nijinsky, George De La Pena is physically slighter, more delicate than the model*, but remarkably open and believable in his passions, his dancing genius and his frail mental makeup. His affair with older ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (Alan Bates in tremendous form) is natural, touching & dangerous, while his ultimately tragic rebound move into the waiting arms of ballet groupie Leslie Browne understandable. And if Bates steals the pic, De La Pena gets its two peak moments: dramatically in a room destruction scene, stunningly set to a furious cut from Stravinsky’s RITE OF SPRING, and balletically in a superb recreation of his scandalous AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, much helped by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth’s stage lighting on both Nijinsky and a stunning replica of Léon Bakst’s original backdrop painting, in rich Fauvist colors. On release, a major disappointment compared to TURNING POINT, it now seems the more significant achievement.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Writer Ben Hecht, in one of his occasional outings as writer/director, had Nijinsky in mind on his ballet themed murder mystery SPECTER OF THE ROSE/’46. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/specter-of-rose-1946.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Billy Wilder tried to interest Sam Goldwyn in this story, but the idea of it ending in an insane asylum, with the greatest dancer of his generation thinking he was a horse (!) was a step too far for Sam. Too depressing! But wait, said Wilder, it has a happy ending . . . he wins the Kentucky Derby!
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Mikhail Baryshnikov, who starred in Ross’s THE TURNING POINT, and turned this film down, had a build closer to the real Nijinsky.
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