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Sarah Lamb starred in the demanding double role that the ballet is famous for and which the film focuses on. Not unlike the character portrayed by Natalie Portman, she is a diaphanous beauty, who knows how to turn into a splendidly vicious and irresistible seductress. Lamb, however, is also the dancer who, two days before the performance, exposed the movie’s fallacies on live television, refuting what Portman had said just a few minutes earlier. Her criticism of the movie, the most diplomatically formulated I have heard from a representative of the dance world, sounded painfully familiar. After all, cinema has always misrepresented ballet, contrary to what Portman and others claimed.
Bleeding feet, broken legs, nervous breakdowns, fading divas and dragon mothers have long been the favourite storylines of sensationalist films, as evident even in soppy children’s stuff such as the 1966 Disney TV movie Ballerina. Such stereotyping is also present in the much-idealised character of the tyrannical ballet-master/choreographer/artistic director. Think, for instance, of John Barrymore’s crippled puppeteer and ballet-master in The Mad Genius (1931), Maria Ouspenskaya’s super-scary Madame Kirowa in Waterloo Bridge (1931) and, of course, Anton Walbrook’s Diaghilev-lookalike Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes (1948). Alas, it is only trite stereotypes that seem to make it to the big screen.
Swan Lake, too, as the most stereotypical and stereotyped ballet ever, featured, inevitably, in hundreds of films, although frequently as an unintentional parody of itself. See, for example, Waterloo Bridge, in which Vivien Leigh dances what used to be the most ludicrous choreographic adaptation of the immortal work before Benjamin Millepied rechoreographed it — alas — for Aronofsky.
Such obsessive fascination seems to stem from the ballet’s alleged ‘dark’ storyline, which, in reality, is not that dark and boils down to yet another take on the eternal triangle. True, the devilish double of the good princess is created by the powers of black magic, but this is as sinister as it gets. It is only through the magic of the camera lens and in the twisted minds of some script-writers that the ballet turns into an accursed opus, and, as such, provides the background to the murkiest deeds — check, for a laugh, the 1984 Italian/Hungarian Etoile, in which dancers are sacrificed to a gigantic ballerina-devouring swan that inhabits the vaults of a remote opera house.
Primed by such a well-constructed and established media tradition, viewers are thus likely to be disappointed by the absence of both horrific transformations and violent eroticism in the Royal Ballet’s luscious, though slightly dated production. Yet, like me, they might fall entirely under the spell of Lamb’s performance and relegate any absurd cinematic fantasy to dungeons populated by bloodthirsty swans.
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