The White Crow

Stick with Billy Elliot or Black Swan if you want an entertaining ballet movie. Dance fans might enjoy this film more, but for me, I thought it was incredibly boring.

This story of an extraordinary talent was almost deathly dull. A much better film could have been made here, but wasn't sadly...

I learned something about Rudolph Nureyev thanks to _The White Crow_, specifically how little I care about him.

Ralph Fiennes directs this biopic of the Russian dancer's defection to the West, and wastes a lot of energy on an unnecessarily overcomplicated time-line that sucks the drama from the story. Fiennes does wonderful work on the images yet pays very little attention to the dancing, which, surprisingly, was my favourite part of the film and, one would think, an important part of a ballerina's life.

(And I'm just kidding about my favourite part being the dancing, really it was the full frontal male nudity, though I found Nureyev's nascent homosexuality a tad too understated in the film to my liking.)

Ballet dancer Oleg Ivenko obviously does a marvelous job filling Nureyev's slippers, though his acting is stretched a bit thin in places, as was, I was sadly surprised to see, that of Adele Exarchopoulos. Perhaps it was because she was forced to act in English here, but I had the impression she thought she was running lines and no one told her the real movie had started and she was being filmed.

After all is said and danced, _The White Crow_ is like a ballet, beautiful but ultimately uninteresting.