"Veronique Doisneau"
A Film by Jerome Bel and Pierre Dupouey
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
March 8, 2009
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
Veronique Doisneau, 42 years old, married, with two children, winding up her career as a sujet in the corps of the Paris Opera Ballet. This middle-class worker is the subject of what film-maker Jerome Bel calls an “application of Marxist theory to a monarchical organization.” In 37 minutes “Veronique Doisneau” reveals the toll a lifetime of physical and emotional discipline takes on a beautiful young woman. But the film-maker is a dancer himself, and his portrayal does not slight the sublime nature of her toil. The result is a dancer’s story, told with a dancer’s exquisitely refined sense of balance.
The action takes place on a single evening, on the bare stage of the Paris Opera. Doisneau summarizes her career, opining that she never became a star because she lacked the requisite talent, and was physically fragile after an early back injury. She did not enjoy dancing the choreography of Roland Petit or Maurice Bejart, but loved Petipa, Balanchine and Robbins, and “learned a lot” from Nureyev and Merce Cunningham. She demonstrates for us, gliding across the stage while humming the music to a variation she performed from “la Bayadere,” then donning a tutu to dance and sing a variation she only dreamed of performing, from “Giselle.” (“Partner lift,” she says at one point, while turning alone.) She sits down to watch a dancer she admires, Celine Talon. Then at excruciating full length, Doisneau shows us “the most horrible thing we do,” the part of a corps dancer during the pas de deux from Act 2 of Swan Lake. Crossing her delicate wrists, she stills her body and inclines her head in a static pose, expressionless as the violin soars. Here Bel takes a closeup of her face, a study in professional suppression of feeling. Then at the end, a long long shot as she picks up her things and walks into the wings.
After the screening Bel answered questions from the audience and his friendly host M. Baryshnikov. His film was commissioned by French TV and the Paris Opera Ballet, but its content was negotiated throughout the year and half it took to make. He said he flatly refused a request to cut down the ten-minute sequence from “Swan Lake.” Bel said he wanted to show the dancer as a worker, someone like the rest of us, but that was clearly an impossible task. Doisneau may not be the most beautiful, talented or refined of dancers, but she is far too beautiful, talented and refined to be just like the rest of us. She does have a job, but it’s a job that requires more sacrifice and yields more sanctity than any normal post.
Bel was generous enough to let his subject tell her own story, in words and the language of movement, and it turns out to be two antithetical themes. Marx and the monarchy each make their points, and Veronique Doisneau is apparently content to live, and dance, in the dialectical tension. Her reverences as Giselle are deep bows to an art which has both given and deprived her of life. But it’s her life, and the film-maker, with a sigh and a Gallic shrug, tells us “she’s OK with it.”
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
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