How ballet’s bad boy made the leap to immortality
‘if i had danced, you would remember,’ says the young Rudolf Nureyev at a cocktail party just after he arrives in Paris, arrogantly predicting the standing ovation which met the Russian’s first electric leaps onto the Palais Garnier stage.
The Kirov company made its fateful trip to france in 1961, and the rest is ballet legend, after principal dancer Nureyev defected to the West in the airport in Paris to avoid being sent back by the KGB security services to Moscow.
This moment, featured in many a documentary about Nureyev, is the centrepiece of a new film about the early career of the dancer, directed by Ralph fiennes, who also plays Alexander Pushkin, Nureyev’s ballet master in leningrad. (Who knows whether fiennes’ Russian accent is perfect, but he is strangely convincing in his cardigan as the mild-mannered teacher, who is no voldemort.)
The project is a risky one, replicating both Nureyev’s high passion and vertiginous jumps, and fiennes searched everywhere until he found Oleg ivenko, a Ukrainian dancer with the Tartar State Ballet.
ivenko has the dashing handsomeness of Nureyev, and makes a fine stab at some of the performances. But when real-life bad-boy dancer Sergei Polunin arrives to play Nureyev’s roommate, Yuri Soloviev, you sense the charisma and whiff of danger missing from ivenko’s delivery.
Still, there is plenty of retro entertainment to be had in the burlesque bars and drinking dens of Sixties Paris, as Nureyev explores the decadent West.
He hangs out with french dancers and befriends Clara Saint (a moody and oddly plain Adele Exarchopoulos), whose contacts with the french government will be key.
Alexey Morozov is dryly funny as Strizhevsky, the exasperated KGB officer placed in charge of keeping Nureyev on the straight and narrow.
Actually, Nureyev was never narrow in his tastes, and the film features his lacklustre affair with Pushkin’s wife when he shares the couple’s cramped leningrad apartment, and his homosexual passion with a German dancer.
fiennes shows Nureyev looking awed at manly Greek marble statues in Paris museums, as
everything gets increasingly gay in both senses of the word. When the dancer stands longingly beneath the word ‘Liberté’ etched on a French monument, we get the point.
The White Crow is scripted childhood in rural poverty, his struggles as a trainee dancer in Leningrad, and artistic and political liberation in Paris.
There is no space here for Nureyev’s later career , as a director of the P aris Opera Ballet and at the Royal Ballet, where he famously partnered Margot Fonteyn.
Perhaps because Nureyev’s life is so well known, and the defection is foreshadowed, there’s a sense that we are just waiting for R udi and the dra - matic stand-off at Le Bourget.
Fiennes has made a classy drama, but the thanklessness of his task is seen in the final credits which show the fluid grace of the real Nureyev , dancing leaps and bounds above the rest.