The White Crow

seen on 13 April 2019

Ralph Fiennes directs this film, written by David Hare and inspired by Julie Kavanagh's biography of Rudolf Nureyev. The  film concerns the young Rudolf Nureyev, played by Ukrainian dancer Oleg Ivenko, leading up to his defection from the Soviet Union in Paris in 1961. Fiennes also plays Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, a ballet master who took an interest in the young student. Pushkin and his wife Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova) had Nureyev stay in their flat; in the film he and Xenia have an affair.

The film intercuts scenes from Nureyev's harsh boyhood (he was actually born on a train), his student days in Leningrad and Moscow, and the fateful tour of the Kirov Ballet to Paris. By turns voraciously open to new experience, determined to excel at dancing (conscious of having started relatively late in classical training), arrogant to the point of rudeness, and charmingly naive, Rudi was exhilarated by Paris and socialised far more than the KGB minders wanted him to. When the company was at the airport to fly on to London, he was told he had to return to Moscow for specious reasons; almost on the spur of the moment (as portrayed here) he asked for political asylum.

The performances are good; Ralph Fiennes made the important decision to use a dancer who could act, rather than an actor and a body double, to portray Nureyev, and in Oleg Ivenko he found the young man he needed. While the inimitable Nureyev charisma is missing, Ivenko is a fine dancer and he gives a good performance of a young man coming into his full strength as his profession, but with a personality that is often exasperating to others. The film is perhaps rather too respectful of the subject, glancing at seductions and affairs with both women and men quite discreetly; but the focus is, after all, on the budding career and the momentous decision to defect.

Interestingly, all the scenes in Russia are filmed in Russian, with a predominantly Russian-speaking cast (Fiennes himself was coached in the language to play his part). The scenes in Paris are mostly in English (often with French accents); and there are scenes indicating that Nureyev himself was painstakingly learning English. I wonder whether the language of communication between the French hosts and the Soviet guests really was English, considering that ballet itself reached its classic forms in both France and Russia. 

Probably no-one else can fully convey Nureyev's impact on stage. Those who saw him will shake their heads; those who did not must take it on trust, relying on contemporary footage (not nearly as sophisticated as today's ballet filming) and on films such as this which give the background to his extraordinary career.