When Rudolf Nureyev arrived in Paris in 1966, the press came with their flashbulb cameras and the culture ministry brought greetings and flowers. However, they weren’t there for Nureyev. The occasion was the Kirov Ballet’s first trip to the West since World War II and Nureyev was just one member of the company whose talent was unknown outside the Soviet Union. Within weeks, he would be famous throughout the world as a dancer, but even more so, for humiliating the oppressive Soviet regime. He defected to France in the Paris airport before returning home, his KGB handlers held at bay by French police. Nureyev had no ideology. He was just tired of being told what to do during every minute of his life.
Directed by Ralph Fiennes, The White Crow dramatizes Nureyev’s life from birth through his triumph in his Paris on stage and at the airport. The film jumps confidently and without confusion between decades and places, crisscrossing the many threads of his life until a tapestry is sewn. Based on Julie Kavanagh’s biography on the dancer, The White Crow adheres closely to the facts.
The film’s star, Oleg Ivenko, bares physical resemblance to Nureyev and, as principal dancer with the Tatar State Academic Opera and Ballet, he can dance. However, The White Crow isn’t primarily a movie about ballet. It’s not The Red Shoes or Black Swan but a nuanced story of a life shaped by art and imagination butting against repression. As a boy (played by Maksimilian Grigoriyev), Nureyev is shown gazing at every far horizon, inspired by the escape suggested by passing trains as well as the opera house in his dilapidated provincial Russian town. Fortunately, Ufa was a place that benefitted from the presence of performing artists exiled from Moscow and Leningrad by Soviet cultural authorities. Nureyev is also entranced by paintings. While attending dance academy in Leningrad, he haunts the Hermitage and when in Paris, he makes for the Louvre.
Fiennes costars as Alexander Pushkin, the one instructor at the academy with whom Nureyev, already wild and uncompromising at age 17, was able to work. Patient and reserved, Pushkin became the benign father figure the young dancer needed. His enduring advice to Nureyev concerned technique as the means, not the end. He asked Nureyev to reflect on the meaning of dance: It takes the audience elsewhere through stories that dispense with words in favor of motion.
The White Crow’s title alludes to Nureyev’s inescapable identity as a rare bird. As a child, he held back from the snowball fights that amused his classmates. He socialized little with fellow students in Leningrad and bucked authority at every opportunity. KGB minders followed him as he struck up a friendship with Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a well-connected young woman who became instrumental in his defection. Even his few friends felt the force of his terrible ego, compensation for his insecure provincial origins fortified by the unfailing love of his mother and encouraged by a profound awareness of his talent.
