Old Yorker

  • The White Crow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ralph Fiennes (2018)

    It’s a relief to report that the title bird is no relation to another feathered friend of the ballet world on screen.  Ralph Fiennes’s film, in spite of serious defects, is far from the monstrosity that was Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.  Text at the start explains that a white crow – belaya vorona in Russian – is, not unexpectedly, a creature that stands out from its fellows.  The white crow here is Rudolf Nureyev:  Fiennes tells the story of his life up to the age of twenty-three and his defection to the West, which is both the starting point and the climax to the tale.  In between, there are flashbacks to Nureyev’s tough childhood in Siberia; his time at the Vaganova Academy in Leningrad (as St Petersburg then was), including his sexual relationships with other young dancers and with his teacher’s wife; and the highlights of his time in Paris – his performances with the Kirov Ballet and social interactions – just before his defection.  The screenplay by David Hare moves back and forth between these different points in time, giving the narrative a surface complexity but depriving it of a strong core.  Fiennes and Hare are at pains to steer clear of the crudely obvious and to bury any incriminating evidence of a trashy biopic but struggle to find much to put in place of what they avoid.  The White Crow is tastefully unilluminating.

    In the opening scene, an apparatchik (Vitaliy Kovalenko) questions ballet master Alexander Pushkin (Ralph Fiennes) about Nureyev’s defection.  Asked if he knew his former pupil was planning this, Pushkin answers ‘nyet’ – a common enough word in Anglophone Cold War spy thrillers but often (along with ‘do svidaniya’ if you’re lucky) the only Russian in the vocabulary of these movies, whose Soviet characters tend to favour heavily accented English.  Pushkin and his interrogator, however, continue to speak in their native language, as do Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko) and other Russians throughout the film.  (The accented English comes mainly in conversations between Rudi and his friends in the Parisian beau monde.)   The linguistic ‘realism’ feels like part of the film’s attempt to be biopically a cut above but it’s an inevitably vain attempt:  the English subtitles make clear how uninspired, and sometimes clichéd, David Hare’s dialogue is.

    The international cast, on the other hand, is largely impressive.  Adèle Exarchopoulos is delicately and sometimes touchingly nuanced as Clara Saint, a Parisian socialite currently in mourning for her lover:  he was the son of André Malraux, then the French Minister for Culture – a connection that proves useful when Rudi decides to stay put in the West.   In the meantime, as well as flirting with Clara, he becomes friends in Paris with the dancer and choreographer Pierre Lacotte, deftly played by Raphaël Personnaz.  In a smaller role, Olivier Rabourdin is excellent as the senior airport security officer at Le Bourget, where the defection takes place.  Maksimilian Grigoriyev is vividly expressive as the eight-year-old Rudi, both facially and when he dances.  Among the protagonist’s lovers, Louis Hofmann (as a German dancer) and Chulpan Khamatova (Pushkin’s wife) both register.  Fiennes himself is almost too expert.  He captures what there is to the thinly written role of the dedicated, melancholy Pushkin in that opening interrogation scene.  He has little more to tell us in what follows.

    As the white crow, the Ukrainian Oleg Ivenko always does command attention and not just because he appears, to this inexpert eye, to be a superb dancer.  (He’s a soloist with the M Jalil State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.)  Born in 1996, Ivenko is exactly the right age for the part.  His youthfulness ensures we don’t forget that Nureyev was only a few years out of his teens when he defected; it also helps Ivenko present different aspects of Rudi’s strong will.  This comes across sometimes as childish petulance, at other times as the green shoots of a deeper determination and egocentric drive.  In his offstage scenes, though, Ivenko, in his screen acting debut, often epitomises the whole film’s cautious, toned-down quality.  How much, you wonder, is his discretion a response to Ralph Fiennes’s direction of him?  Even Nureyev’s loss of temper seems somehow controlled – except for one scene.  In a restaurant with Clara, he wants her to have words with the waiter on his behalf.  She insists it’s up to him to complain.  He angrily refuses to do because, he says, he knows the waiter despises his peasant origins.

    This moment is even stronger in retrospect because it anticipates what happens in the airport finale.  Clara, after her timely arrival at Le Bourget, makes clear to Rudi that it’s he who must tell the security men that he wants to defect.  Clara rather stage whispers these words in his ear but the sensational events of 16 June 1961 are, for the most part, staged well.  The Kirov have completed their Paris season and are preparing to fly to London when Nureyev is informed that he, alone among the company, will return immediately to the Soviet Union.  He smells a rat and refuses to go.  The enfant terrible of the company, he’s shown an insatiable appetite for the pleasures and possibilities of the French capital that has made his KGB minder Strizhevsky (Alexsey Morozov) increasingly edgy.   On the Kirov’s last night in Paris and in spite of Strizhevsky’s efforts, Rudi gets his own way about going out with his friends.  Oleg Ivenko has a fine moment when, sitting quietly in a club, Nureyev looks longingly at the intimacy of couples, straight and gay, together at nearby tables.  This scene articulates satisfyingly with the next day at Le Bourget because Fiennes and David Hare don’t do the usual thing:  in this instance at least, The White Crow departs from biopic convention in a substantial way.

    Such convention would dictate that the idea of staying in the liberated West takes shape in Rudi’s mind as he gazes at the other couples in the night club.  Instead, the film presents the decision he makes at the airport as an instinctive reaction to the news that he’s to be sent back home.  The defection is not the fruition of a cunning plan on Nureyev’s part but almost an accident – something that the Soviets, by their authoritarian heavy-handedness, bring upon themselves.  I don’t know if this account of what happened at Le Bourget is accurate but it is emotionally persuasive.  (The one relatively weak aspect of the episode is that Alexsey Morozov – who conveys most effectively the KGB officer’s mixture of weariness and unease at losing the argument with Rudi the previous evening – doesn’t suggest as strongly as he might Strizhevsky’s alarm at the implications for himself of losing his man altogether.)   In these last twenty minutes or so The White Crow comes to dramatic life.  Elsewhere, its highlights are in the observation of ballet – not only the onstage performances of Ivenko, Sergei Polunin (as Yuri Soloviev) and others, but also the practice room, where Ralph Fiennes expresses a genuine fascination with the detail of the dancers’ preparations and extraordinary physical positions.  Ilan Eshkeri’s original music is skilfully integrated with the famous ballet scores on the soundtrack.

    28 March 2019

  • Making Montgomery Clift

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Clift, Hillary Demmon (2018)

    According to production notes on this documentary, which was screened at the BFI Flare festival, the directors/producers of Making Montgomery Clift intend ‘rigorously [to] examine the flawed narratives that have come to define Monty’s legacy’.  Robert Clift, the cinematographer and narrator too, is the great actor’s youngest nephew; Hilary Demmon, the film’s editor, is Robert’s wife.  (For clarity, I’ll call each member of the Clift family by their forename only.)  The central ‘flawed narrative’ is that Monty was tormented by his sexuality; and that this torment explains the alcohol and prescription drugs dependency that badly damaged his health and made him nearly unemployable in Hollywood in the last years of his short life (which ended in 1966, when he was forty-five).   At the start of his film, Robert describes his uncle as someone remembered less for his acting than for his unhappy personal life.  That may be true in the popular mind but is it how cinema-lovers primarily see Monty?

    Robert’s opening remark introduces a tendency of Making Montgomery Clift to look at things simplistically or one-sidedly.  On the matter of whether Monty was troubled by his sexual orientation, the film elides a distinction between his private and professional lives.  If Monty was conflicted and depressive, Robert seems to ask, how do you explain this home-movie footage that I’m showing you of a wonderfully exuberant, laughing young man?  The serious car accident in May 1956, during the filming of Raintree County, isn’t mentioned until quite late in the narrative.  His injuries were face-changing; for a famously beautiful movie star, they therefore threatened to be life-changing too.  In the event, the threat was minimised because Monty had always been attracted primarily to playing people whose situation and motives interested him;  in an early 1963 television interview with the journalist Hy Gardner, he cites his work in The Young Lions (1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) as his two favourites among all his performances.  It’s nevertheless a non sequitur when Robert, because these were both post-accident films, suggests that Monty’s choice contradicts the received wisdom that he struggled emotionally with the impact of the car crash.  Robert’s approach throughout contrasts strikingly with Monty’s own remark in a 1958 sound interview an extract from which is included near the end of Making Montgomery Clift.  Responding to a question about his alleged self-destructive nature that seems to demands a yes/no answer, Monty, in plaintive exasperation, insists that a person is ‘not just one thing’.

    This film’s chief asset is the wealth (to put it mildly) of home movies and audio recordings available to the directors, which they use to create a fluent, fast-moving narrative.  To describe the material simply as ‘archival’ doesn’t do justice to how singular much of it is.  The sound recordings are often the work of, and comprise conversations including, Robert’s father Brooks (Monty’s elder brother, 1919-86).  Brooks’s interlocutors, including Monty, were usually unaware that a recording was being made.  Robert’s mother Eleanor says about her ex-husband, with a mixture of embarrassment and regretful understanding, that ‘recording was what Brooks did’. It’s hardly surprising that, at one point, Robert gets preoccupied with his father’s obsessions almost at the expense of illustrating what Robert sees as his uncle’s true self.

    One of those obsessions included biographies of Monty, by Robert LaGuardia and Patricia Bosworth, first published in 1977 and 1978 respectively.  The LaGuardia book is dismissed by Clift family members generally as a muckraking misrepresentation of its subject.  The Bosworth biography is a more complicated matter, not least because, as Robert himself says, Bosworth has long been a part of the family’s lives:  now in her eighties, she’s one of the talking heads in the film.  Largely because of the LaGuardia experience, Brooks was in very frequent phone and written contact with Bosworth while she was completing her book.  He therefore felt a personal responsibility that the biography failed in important ways to deliver what he was expecting and that it confirmed, especially in retrospect, the idea that Monty struggled to live with himself.

    Monty and Brooks  have similar speech rhythms and the film-makers are determined to tell their story with minimal reliance on text:  they cut back and forth between images of the brothers as the conversations play and this visual cutting is so rapid that it distracts attention from the words.  It might have been better just to put the name ‘Monty’ or ‘Brooks’ on the screen to clarify who’s speaking.  On the plus side, the repeated insertion of brief clips from Monty’s Hollywood films, as a kind of analogy with events in his biography, works well.  Since the main focus of Making Montgomery Clift is on his life rather than his craft, the clips also serve as welcome reminders of what an extraordinary actor he was.

    The documentary is not impartial – as the work of a blood relative (albeit one who never knew Monty:  Robert was born in 1974), you wouldn’t want, let alone expect, it to be.  Robert makes explicitly clear that, in matters Monty, he takes sides.  Robert is unreservedly negative about John Wayne (whom he ‘can’t stand’), for his behaviour on the set of Red River, and John Huston, for his treatment of Monty during the making of Freud and, especially, for triggering the aftermath:  Universal Studios sued Monty for making the shooting schedule so expensively protracted.  He eventually won the case but Robert blames Huston for bringing about a sharp increase in his uncle’s use of drugs and drink and, consequently, a deterioration in his physical and mental health.  This viewer instinctively sympathises with the tirades against both Johns yet Robert surely lays the blame for Monty’s final decline too squarely on Huston.   That 1958 audio interview (see above) makes clear that Monty’s self-destructive behaviour was part of his public image long before Freud.   His notorious difficulty in remembering lines – although he claims to have no problem learning good lines – also predates his bad experience with Huston.

    On the subject of Freud … It’s understandable that Robert wants to refute the predictable psychoanalysis, especially regarding Monty’s relationship with his mother, in which both the LaGuardia and Bosworth biographies, to different extents, indulged.  As a result, though, Robert eschews any kind of explanation of Monty’s (or, indeed, Brooks’s) personality or behaviour:  Monty’s sexuality (like Brooks’s recording mania) is just a fact of his life.  It must have made that life complicated, even so – not least because it seems the nature of Monty’s relationships was itself complicated.  Their mother tells Brooks that Monty was ‘homosexual very early’; Brooks says he was bisexual;  according to another contributor, Monty’s bisexuality meant that he slept with men but had loving, non-physical relationships with women.  It’s even harder to accept that continuing, necessary suppression in Hollywood of his sexual identity wouldn’t have taken a psychological toll.

    From an early age (and long before stardom), Monty was exceptionally independent and selective in his choice of roles.  He steered clear of studio contracts.  He insisted on script approval (he was a famous rewriter of his and others’ lines).  He turned down, among other parts, Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and Cal Trask in East of Eden.  Even without Cal on his CV, Monty became famous for playing characters that, as interpreted by him, were emotionally vulnerable in an unusually expressive and unguarded way.  The tendency to conflate a Hollywood star’s screen persona and real-life personality thereby offered him a degree of protection denied to, for example, his near contemporary Rock Hudson.  Unlike Hudson, Monty didn’t have to get married as a front:  he readily cultivated the press characterisation of him as an actor so dedicated to his work that he didn’t have time for off-screen romance or social life.  There’s good reason to believe that he, in effect, exploited the concealment of his sexual identity to considerable creative advantage.  Yet this must still have involved a nervously wearing balancing act, at a time when the law dictated that a gay man couldn’t, even in private, rest easy.

    In the production notes that formed the BFI handout, Hilary Demmon says that she and Robert ‘kept asking ourselves, “Who else was Monty?”‘   The limitation of the film they’ve made is that they interpret ‘else’ as ‘instead of’ to the virtual exclusion of ‘else’ in the sense of ‘in addition to’.  Anxious to portray Monty as other than the queer icon/beautiful loser of pop mythology, they are disinclined to try to integrate different ways of seeing him.  Even so, Making Montgomery Clift is thoroughly fascinating and its makers’ motives are likeable.  A short part of the narrative covers the so far abortive attempts to turn Monty’s life into a biopic.  If or when it becomes one and the result travesties the protagonist along traditional lines, it’ll be good to remember this documentary.  It’s not only an absorbing piece of work; it’s a corrective in waiting.

    27 March 2019

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