Cinema: Blunted Point

NIJINSKY

Directed by Herbert Ross

Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler

This movie implies that Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary dancer, was driven into his famous madness by a combination of overwork and heterosexuality. The former, it says, was a direct result of his consuming ambition to be a choreographer. The latter came from his involvement with Romola de Pulszky, portrayed as a rather silly society girl who joins Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with the express purpose of seducing the dancer. After a number of rather tedious misunderstandings with the impresario (who is also his lover), Nijinsky indeed falls into her waiting arms; at that point his decline from a kind of noble and innocent moodiness to lunacy begins.

There may be some truth in all this, but these triangular banalities no more explain the dancer’s sad fate than they illuminate his genius. His troubles with what would now be called “relationships” are the symptoms rather than the causes of his collapse. Some people will be titillated by the openness with which homosexual love is portrayed in the film. But this is mostly a slow, cautious biography, elegantly attentive to Edwardian decor and dress. It slights Nijinsky’s melodramatic story and, finally, offends with its relentless reductionism. There are times when excesses of good taste become a kind of bad taste, a falsification of a subject’s spirit and milieu. This is never more true than when the troubles of a genius are presented in boring and conventional terms.

The film contains a rather guarded performance by Alan Bates as Diaghilev and an ill-considered one by Leslie Browne, the young ballerina in Director Ross’s The Turning Point. She is here both glum and insipid as she pursues not an ambition but a man. A young dancer from the American Ballet Theater, George de la Pena, acts the part of Nijinsky quite effectively. There is a certain ineluctable spirit about him. But of his dancing, strangely, nothing at all can be said: Ross never permits him to per form a complete sequence of a ballet. In one instance he shoots him only from the waist up; in another he uses optical effects that render De la Pena’s move ments jerky and blurry. The rest is just bits and pieces. All this leaves a sizable hole in the middle of the picture. If you do not fairly represent an artist’s gifts his reason for living, what is the point of detaining the audience with the ordinariness of his everyday life? Tragic as his problems finally became, they could have happened to anybody, where as a Nijinsky happens perhaps once in a century. It is a shame not to concentrate on what was unique about his genius.

—Richard Schickel