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