BALLET 422
Magnolia Pictures
Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B+
Director: Jody Lee Lipes
Screenwriter: Jody Lee Lipes
Cast: Sterling Hyltin, Justin Peck, Amar Ramasar
Screened at: Journalists’ link, NYC, 1/27/15
Opens: February 6, 2015
When I was in charge of a program to get outside speakers and celebs into my high school, I brought in a small group from the New York City Ballet. They performed in the auditorium to recorded music. Some of the seventeen-year-olds in the audience were laughing at them for the usual macho reason, so the more egregious of them were invited up to the stage to the applause of those remaining in their seats. One dancer stood in front of the leader of the wise-guys, got up on tip-toes, delivered a few steps, and challenged the senior simply to stand on his toes for three minutes. He couldn’t do it, and that failure won the dancers over to the young scholars in the gallery.
Jody Lee Lipes, who directs the sparkling documentary “Ballet 422” does something similar, though obviously more costly than what went on in my high school. He hones in on members of the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center where a member of the corps de ballet (read: the chorus, the folks not good enough to be soloists) serves as choreographer. One Justin Peck is given two months to write and deliver a modern ballet, which sounds stressful enough, except that he has behind him a dedicated group of dancers, musicians, costume designers, make-up artists and lighting technicians in one of the most striking buildings for culture in America on New York’s W. 65th Street.
Instead of paying $120 for a decent seat (if you sit near the back of the orchestra you might as well watch the dancers on television), you can watch not only segments of the Ballet 422 (so-called because it is the 422nd time that the New York City Ballet is commissioned to perform an original work) but an extensive treatment of the long and sometimes physical painful process of rehearsals. But before we get to the rehearsal floor, we watch the twenty-five year old choreographer planning the steps in a notebook as though he were Coach Marvin Lewis mapping strategy for the Cincinnati Bengals. He chooses Bohuslav Martinu’s “Sinfonietta La Jolla,” a contemporary piece that is not too highly dissonant. This is about the only point that director Lipes shows a collaborative art form to be centered on a single designer.
To the amateur eye (such as mine) the rehearsals all seem just fine, yet Peck finds fault now and then, in fact quite regularly, though when he corrects dancers like Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar (the latter obviously of East Indian background), he is no John Simon but rather lets them now that he thinks they’re otherwise great.
As we watch the rehearsal with notations “two months to go before premiere,” “one month to go,” “one week to go,” at least some of us in the audience might expect to champ at the bit waiting to see samples of the real performance. In fact the weak point of the movie is that we see so little of the premiere, though granted, the film’s aim is to see the rehearsal process. The lighting is so stunning inside the David H. Koch Theater that the sound-and-light aspect of the performance threatens to be its highlight. Through all, Justin Peck, suited up behind his round glasses, sits in the audience, joining the cast to the applause of the full house, then promptly heading backstage for his relatively menial role as a dancer himself in the corps de ballet.
Kudos to director Lipes for shunning that deadly convention that makes documentaries off limits to most moviegoers. There are no talking heads, no interviews, nobody looking at the camera to teach us in the audience what might seem obvious from the action. Instead, all conversation is organic, dancer to dancer, choreographer to musician. As a 75-minutes Ballet 101 lesson, this film should not be missed.
Rated PG. 75 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – A-
Technical – A-
Overall – B+