istara
The Good: the wonderful costumes, the stunning dance routines, and the performance of Soki in the lead role. Purely as a spectacle, there's plenty to enjoy.The Bad: the storyline was completely disjointed. Certain scenes and interactions made no sense, suddenly following on from one another in a jarring way. There seemed to be gaps (scenes edited out for length?). It was hard to tell how much time was supposed to have elapsed. The way Soki meets Gabrielle in a car park, and then next scene she's suddenly got some huge show happening: it was bewildering. Let's not even get started on the confusing relationships. I'm not sure what I was supposed to be watching there, or who was already supposed to have slept with whom.Ultimately this would have been a better film if they had cut down on the endless scenes of Soki's pain and exercise and bleeding eyes and ice baths, and added a bit more storytelling. Much of the US/ New York stuff could have been cut/tightened (particularly since it wasn't biographically accurate, and served minimal apparent purpose. Save for Ulliel, the NY cast didn't reappear once we moved to Paris).
BebeJumeau
The dance sequences were wonderful - all credit to Soko who did her own dancing, Fanny Sage who was body double to the delightful Lily Depp, and dance adviser US artist Jody Sperling a major dancer and innovative performer in her own right, whose work is excellently showcased here. I loved the intelligent and exciting re-staging of Fuller's dances and the more conceptual scene of Duncan's overtly erotic lap dance rapidly clearing multiple rooms of elderly fearful conservative white males - Kristeva meets Busby Berkley. Go to see the film for these breathtaking sequences alone It was good to see a female director tackling a female subject However the plot was inaccurate and ridiculous and clichéd in a manner that would be expected of Hollywood say in the 1950s. about 95% of the story apart from the dancing was made up. The decadent male junkie significant other and sponsor/art fund-er was an invention, the Montana/Wyoming childhood - possibly filmed in the Czech Republic was totally made up - although its nods in styling and lighting to those Europhile fantasies of the wild west - Heaven's Gate and the Hateful Eight were nice Easter eggs, the weird puritan temperance colony in New York where Fuller's on screen mother lived - adorned with a surprising amount of Catholic kitsch for a fundamentalist protestant cult - totally invented, the ignoring of Fuller's primary same-same lifestyle and the casting of Isadora Duncan as a duplicitous ambitious lesbian - All About Eve rang they wanted their plot line - makes the film down right homophobic And let's not mention the modernist myth of the outsider misunderstood genius battling through with courage and persistence ... yawn yawn yawn
mardou sarant
A very beautiful film directed with vigor and taste. To classify this film as biopic does not do justice to it and it is even misleading. I read so many ill directed criticism on what is and what is not historically accurate in the movie. Who cares? Who would criticize the Greek poet Kavafy for misrepresenting historical figures in his poems? For me 'The Dancer' is a poetic film on beauty and the passion for creativity and it was a pleasure to watch. For two hours I was immersed in the film's world, relishing every bit of it; the elliptical decor, the unreal almost lighting, the spectacular dance, the energy. Indeed what I liked most was the fact that the film did not make an effort to faithfully reconstruct an era, but rather create its own unique universe combining various elements in a coherent whole. Let alone the amazing amount of work that went into it, the production design, the choreography, the music. The audacious directorial approach is justified by the result. Soko's choice to play Loie Fuller was excellent as she brought into the part her own fierce determination to develop in the show and music business matched with confident and truthful acting. The film is an amazing feat anyway, but even more so as a debut feature.
richard-1787
For the last several decades, we have had movies showing us the grime behind the apparently beautiful world of the dance. This is another in that by now too long series, one that has nothing new to add. We see lots of ugly backstage scenes, and then, very rarely, a glimpse of the beauty of a Fuller performance.Part of that is because, if one were to judge from this movie, Fuller was very much a one-trick pony. She was not, in any significant sense, a dancer. Rather, she was a show woman who figured out how to use lighting and mirrors to create a beautiful, magical effect as she twirled around waving robes extended on bamboo batons.In fact, however, the real Loie Fuller was a fascinating and very versatile woman involved in developing new lighting techniques and all sorts of other things to improve stage performance. This movie VERY much shortchanges her, and should not in any way be taken as a biopic. Why a woman director would reduce an evidently very intelligent and interesting woman to a pouting bundle of uncontrolled emotions I do not know.If you were to believe this movie - and you shouldn't - there really wasn't much to Fuller's art. Nothing like ballet, or modern dance, or jazz dancing, or ... Just twirling around, waving her robes, while different colored lights and background mirrors enhanced the effect. So we are left with her life. If it was at all as it is presented in the movie, and there is no reason to assume that that was the case, it was pretty miserable. We see that she spends lots of time building up her shoulder muscles so she can keep waving those robes, with the result that her arms often hurt. The light from the colored light hurts her eyes. She ends up in several confusing and bad relationships. A rough life, in other words. But the movie does nothing to make us care.This movie needed a MUCH better script to make us understand and sympathize with Fuller. Otherwise, except for the few moments when she goes into her dance, it's just a lot of uncontrolled emotions that we have no reason to care about. It seems a real shame to have reduced what was evidently a very interesting and intelligent woman to a bundle of uninteresting emotions.
AD
