“Polina” tells a pretty ballerina story
★★★5 Unrated. In Russian and French with subtitles. 112 minutes
It may not be obvious to movie audiences that “Polina” is based on a graphic novel: Bastien Vivès’s 2011 tale of a young Russian ballerina, rendered in monochrome pen-and-ink drawings, with fluid, gray washes. But it’s quickly apparent that there is someone with a great eye behind the camera.
Actually, there are two someones: French writerdirector Valérie Müller and her co-director (and husband) Angelin Preljocaj, an acclaimed contemporary choreographer. Preljocaj’s influence is clear in the dancing scenes, even an early one in which the title character (played as an 8-year-old by Veronika Zhovnytska, and later as a teenager by Anastasia Shevtsova, a former member of the Mariinsky Ballet) shakes her groove thang while walking home from ballet school in the snow. There’s an intensity and authenticity to Polina’s unrehearsed movements, as well as to the work she puts into dance, even when — maybe especially when — her performance lacks polish.
And that is the whole point of this story, which tracks Polina through her acceptance by the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, her decision to instead follow a boyfriend (Niels Schneider) to study in France with a teacher of modern dance (Juliette Binoche, herself a trained dancer) and Polina’s gradual disillusionment — and ultimate re-engagement — with the art.
Polina, you see, becomes a master of technique — of form without feeling — and has to relearn the answer to the question of why she dances in the first place. At an audition, after an injury has sidelined her promising career, a choreographer invites her to make him “feel something.”
“You want me to dance?” she asks him, puzzled. To which he replies, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
Polina is flummoxed by the paradox inherent in his answer. The ideal of formal perfection, instilled in her by an early, authoritarian teacher (Aleksey Guskov), is all she knows. She’s forgotten how to access the joy of the kid in the snow, which expressed itself not in pirouettes and pliés, but pure, exuberant gesture.
As Polina, Shevstova delivers a performance that feels wonderfully unforced, if that’s the right word, in a role that can only be called “driven.” There’s almost an emptiness about her character. Polina’s expression of self is all on the surface — at least initially.
Eventually, after a period of joblessness and homelessness, Polina finds herself tending bar in Antwerp, where she hooks up, creatively and romantically, with an improvisational dancer (Jérémie Bélingard) who works with street kids. Her first spontaneous movements since the 8-year-old’s snow dance — a marvelous physical ad-lib unleashing not just the artist in her but the animal — come as a revelation, both to us and to her.
It’s doubtful whether non-dance fans will appreciate “Polina” to the same degree as the cognoscenti. “Flashdance” it ain’t. It’s a pretty little fairy tale about what it means to be more than pretty. If it suffers from anything, it’s that, in delivering that message, it is, at times, almost too gorgeous for its own good.