Genius is as genius does, and Rudolf Nureyev made sure nobody was left in any doubt about the scale of either his talents or his ambitions. Based on Julie Kavanagh's biography Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, The White Crow pairs director and actor Ralph Fiennes with screenwriter David Hare to deliver an involving and often thrilling account of Nureyev’s rise to fame as a ballet dancer and his sensational defection to the West in 1961. It pulls off the tricky feat of being both successful drama and a plausible depiction of the rarefied world of ballet.
In its recounting of Nureyev’s life from his birth on board a Trans-Siberian express to that pivotal moment of escape from the suffocating clutches of Nikita Kruschev’s Soviet Union, The White Crow might have benefited from a few snips of the editing shears. Fiennes has helpfully colour-coded the various eras of the story – nostalgic monochrome for Nureyev’s early years in dreary post-war Russia, sludgy brown Cold War tones for his young adulthood in Leningrad and bright light and blue skies for the Paris where he seized his freedom – but you can still occasionally find yourself feeling adrift in a narrative no-man’s land.
However, both Fiennes and Hare play the big moments with panache, much assisted by their star Oleg Ivenko. A Ukrainian dancer, Ivenko is skilled enough to persuade you you’re watching a star being born and a strong enough actor to capture Nureyev’s overweening arrogance and self belief, as well as the potent androgynous sexuality he brought to his dancing (and his private life).
Ivenko also curtly dispenses the peremptory rudeness which would have instantly torpedoed the career of a lesser talent. This Nureyev has no hesitation, as an up-and-coming young dancer, in demanding that he be assigned to a different teacher because he doesn’t like his present one, or in ordering the managing director of the Kirov Ballet out of the room where he’s rehearsing. When a stodgy commissar wants to send him back to be a dancer in Ufa, the provincial town where he grew up, he declares that this will be an unacceptable detour from his inevitable ascent to stardom.
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