The White Crow (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 127 minutes.

R.

Apparently Rudolf Nureyev was as arrogant as he was talented. This movie deals with him as he progresses from a poor nobody in his birth city of UFA taking him to Paris where he is a featured dancer in the Kirov Ballet company and has to make a life-altering decision on the spot.

Directed by Ralph Fiennes from a script by David Hare based on Julie Kavanagh’s biography, Rudolf Nureyev: A Life, Oleg Ivenko plays Nureyev and does all the dancing himself, as he was a Ukrainian dancer from the Tartar State Ballet company. Similar in stature to Nureyev, Ivenko carries the movie and captures his haughtiness and confidence.

Fiennes, who speaks Russian, plays Alexander Pushkin, a teacher Nureyev demanded as his instructor in Leningrad/St. Petersburg while a student at the Leningrad Choreography School. Two women are vital to the story, Pushkin’s wife, Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova), who nurses him back to health after a serious injury as the Pushkins invite him into their small apartment to live with them, and Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an Argentinian heiress who befriends Rudolf in Paris and is a key participant in his defection. Both give fine performances, although Saint is puzzlingly impassive, especially considering the way Rudi treats her.

The film implies that one of the main reasons Nureyev wanted to defect was that he realized he was homosexual , despite having sex with women (he died in Paris, allegedly of AIDS in 1993, although some think that he died from using the toxic AIDS treatment AZT, and had he not used that he would have remained healthy). He felt he needed the freedom he would have in the West.

Unlike most films that center on ballet, the film does not concentrate on the dancing. In fact, it does it just about right. There are some scenes of dancing, but they are not long. There are a lot of people who don’t take to ballet and I’m one of them. I liked what I saw and am glad to have seen what I saw but I wouldn’t have liked to have had to sit through long balletic dances (like the almost interminable dance that concludes 1951's An American in Paris). Ivenko isn’t the astonishingly inventive dancer Nureyev was (was anybody?), but what he displays here is impressive.

One of the more nuanced characters is the KGB officer tasked with overseeing Rudi while in Paris, Strizhevsky (Aleksei Morozov).  Instead of an unsympathetic overlord, Strizhevsky is a complex character who finds himself in a difficult situation. He has a job to do and that’s to keep Rudi in line. Not an ideologue, he mostly fears for his personal safety back in Moscow if anything goes wrong.

This is a pretty long movie to tell the the story of his defection, but it has fine pace.