All the magic’s in the movement
“Polina,” a dance movie based on a graphic novel, reaches a gorgeous crescendo in its final bit: The title character (screen newcomer Anastasia Shevtsova), having taken a few detours from her presumed career path in classical ballet, steps into the spotlight as a choreographer. Her work fuses imagery from her Russian childhood with electronic music, and like several of the film’s dance scenes, it’s far more compelling than the surrounding drama.
Directed by Valerie Muller (who also scripted) and choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, this portrait of the artist as a young ballerina is stubbornly uninvolving for long stretches, but it can also be stirringly cinematic. The first inkling of Polina’s true calling is an exuberant improvised dance by the tween girl. Walking past the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, she lets her inner hip-hopper emerge.
Polina’s acceptance into the Bolshoi Academy is a dream come true for her parents. They are anguished when she instead heads to France to study with an exacting modernist (Juliette Binoche, drawing on her own dance experience).
The film touches persuasively on tender parent-child tensions, but Shevtsova, until recently a dancer with the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, doesn’t quite pierce the narrative’s twodimensionality. Through Preljocaj’s ecstatic choreography, though, she goes deep, and Polina’s story finds its language and its pulse. “Polina.” In Russian and French with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes. Playing: Landmark Nuart, West Los Angeles.