Through its first-hand accounts of individual transformation in the trying and competitive world of dance, Ballerina carefully steps between Western and Soviet borders. Chronicling nearly a dozen female Ballerinas — while, intending no prejudice to gender, in the words of the Director (Bertrand Normand) — the film gives us interview accounts of the dance school-girl experience beginning at the wee-innocent age of….ten. From entrance examinations which horrify the audience (not just in the theater but within the movie), to the trials and discipline which is imposed thereafter, this film shows the accelerated lives of the dancers who, by their early thirties, often reach the conclusion and climax of their dance careers. Left to a world in which so many others their age, admittedly, do not yet know what they want to do with their lives — these Ballerinas have already lived a lifetime by thirty.
We come to sympathize with the gentle yet necessarily incorruptible dancers, as they endure beyond the limits of most talented performers: in talent, in physicality, in movement, in sacrifice, in humility. in grace and lastly, in wit. The audience is not only awed by their talent, discipline and such, but is often wooed and enchanted by the broad and worldly personalities who, up to that moment, were simply and unquestionably “Ballerinas.”
The best aspects of the film (if I may be so blunt) were the emotions and the interviews the dancers evoked, to a tearful audience which empathized with their experience, beauty, and sacrifice. The second favorite is the distinctly rich and witty personalities of each dancer, evident in their words, their lives outside of the dance world (however restricted) and, most of all, in their portrayal from “outsiders” such as the Parisian dancers looking and remarking on the Russian Ballerinas.
The film is rendered with humility and awe. It does so humbly because the director Bertrand Normand, who answered questions poignantly not just in his film but thereafter, acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the life of a dancer second-hand — a wonderfully true confession.
PICTURE CREDIT: VIFF Picture Database. Used With Permission.
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