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To many people, Isadora Duncan is considered to have the same relationship to modern dance that Picasso had to modern painting. She rejected the stuffy, highly conventional constraints of classical ballet and defined expressive dance in her own image. This film is a long biopic of the eccentric free spirit. Too long, in fact. IMDb lists it as 131 minutes, but the VHS linked below is the one I watched, and it runs 153 minutes. The film follows a structure somewhat similar to the well-known Chaplin biopic with Robert Downey, Jr, using a framing device in which an aging Isadora dictates her autobiography to her amanuensis, and this structure sets the stage for a series of flashbacks to the key incidents in her life. (The book they are writing, Isadora Duncan's "Ma Vie", is a real book. See the Amazon links below) The film hits all the high points ... Duncan not only flouted traditional concepts in dance, but she flouted traditional concepts of morality as well.. One of her lovers was the theatre designer, Gordon Craig; another was Paris Singer (heir to a sewing machine fortune), who gave her lavish gifts, including her own dancing school; she bore a child by each of those men, and both children were tragically drowned in an accident on the Seine River in 1913. She spent a considerable time in Russia in the period just after the revolution. That country embraced her as a fellow revolutionary, and gave her an old palace to use as a dancing school. Although Isadora had sworn never to marry, she finally broke down in 1922 and wed a drunken, insane Russian poet named Sergei Yesenin, who was 17 years younger than she. Yesenin later accompanied her on tour but his frequent destructive rages, similar to the hotel room rampages of today's rock stars, caused them both much negative publicity. Of course, those incidents may have been more acceptable in the United States than their pro-Marxist politics. In Isadora's last U.S. tour in 1922-23, she managed to combined "immorality" and Communism in a stage performance in Boston, by waving a red scarf and baring her breast, proclaiming, "This red! So am I!" The following year, Yesenin left Duncan and returned to Moscow where he was institutionalized for mental illness, and eventually committed suicide as soon as he was released. Duncan's own life ended no less tragically than those of her children or her crazy poet. She always wore scarves which trailed behind her, and this caused her death in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of her friend's Bugatti automobile. As the driver sped off, the long cloth wrapped around the vehicle's axle. Ms. Duncan was yanked violently from the car and dragged for several yards before the driver realized what had happened. She died almost instantly from a broken neck. The unconventional socialist actress Vanessa Redgrave was a good choice to play the unconventional socialist dancer, and she was rewarded for her performance with Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, as well as the Best Actress award at Cannes. Unfortunately, the director made all the usual biopic mistakes. The story is too long and rambling and pointless, and tries to pack her entire life into its running time instead of focusing on some important thread or some key portion of her life. We sit back and watch Isadora trot around the globe, apparently abandoning in succession each of the projects she had been extolling the virtues of. The film could have compensated for its unfocused script with some great musical numbers, but the dancing scenes are mostly repetitive. If you watch this film without knowing anything about Duncan's contribution to dance (which places you in the same boat with me), you will conclude that Duncan's entire schtick consisted of prancing about like a twelve year old dreaming of being a dancer, wearing flowing gowns, trailing a diaphanous scarf, bending her knees, pointing her toes, waving her arms, and acting "free". I'm sure that must have been some of what Duncan did, but surely not the whole shebang! I guess I could have handled watching this once, but the process of prancing around the room must have occupied close to an hour of the film's running time, and it looked exactly the same every time. (One of her lovers actually said "will you stop prancing around the goddamned room" just as I was thinking the same thing!) I did, however, enjoy the prancing a lot more on the one occasion when she did it naked. |
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Although the film doesn't cohere very well, there are some great individual scenes. I liked some of the Russian material quite a bit. The one dance scene that is significantly different from the others is Duncan's first performance in Russia. The lights go out while she is performing, and the night seems doomed to be a failure, but everyone there improvises, and they end up having the most memorable night of their lives. Someone in the Russian audience provides a lantern, then the audience members gradually start to sing to provide musical accompaniment. One man manages to produce a squeezebox. Several men join Duncan on stage for traditional Russian dancing, and the film managed to capture the whirlwind of the moment. This scene got me. I was clapping along, completely drawn in. Unfortunately, it takes the film nearly two hours to get to that point, and that wait could be excruciatingly boring at times, and I got the impression that Ms Duncan was both pretentious and mentally ill. If the rest of the film had been as invigorating as the Russian part, I might have enjoyed spending 153 minutes with the eccentric characters and their repetitive behaviors, but it wasn't and I didn't. |
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