33. Grandeur: The Shanghai Ballet and “1917” reviewed by Pippa Hammet
I am happy to report that I’ve had no disturbing dreams recently, but that, nevertheless, security measures have been adopted at Ebersdorf Tower to ensure that no sensitive information is communicated via our pet tomcat Murr, our suspected live spy-camera medium, during nocturnal gatherings of Louise’s co-conspirators. No such feline broadcasts will be allowed. My loving Murr pours his magical vibrations upon Louise, Belle, and Mme Sesostris, all of whom testify to restoration of youthful vigor under his ministrations. Murr can’t be allowed simultaneously to relay plans and ploys to whomever. Murr purrs and his worshippers sigh blissfully beneath his magic. No dangerous talk will be allowed during the nightly therapy sessions.
And the big news: Louise and I were more than impressed by Sandy’s dance for Master Raro. Louise claims that she now employs two choreographers-in-residence, and I am so proud of Master, who has returned to his first love – dance performance. I never realized how talented he is. And how courageous! What other male would reveal so much about his erotic susceptibilities? The solo dance (Oestrus) reminded yours truly of what intrigued me about Master when we met in the early twenty-teens. Louise is seriously considering a revival of her Ebersdorf Ballet Company upon realizing that she has fostered two choreographic protégés. (Albertine and Paco are still in the dark about this new competition.) And Sandy understandably wants to conscript a West Side art gallery for a special showing of the new solo, and the sooner the better, he says.
The last time Louise communicated with Liane Beach, we learned that the strike at the Paris Opera Ballet has deluged Beach’s company, Le Swing, with dozens of requests by POB dancers for a new home. This means that Le Swing may inherit the crème-de-la-crème of current French ballerinas. If Louise were to allow Beach to bring her company to The Louise on an American tour, the publicity would be sensational. (And competition to The Ebersdorf Ballet, of course.) Much to think about.
By the way, from Paris Mme Beach recommends that Louise’s literary society (all four Constant Readers) take on Henry James’ The Bostonians. That’s the one James novel I haven’t read, so I seconded her motion.
Master and I went to the Koch Theater to see the Shanghai Ballets’ Swan Lake in its production by Derek Deane. Deane has responded to the Chinese taste for sheer numbers of on-stage personnel and drill-team choral unison. By my count (the audience does a lot of counting during the Shanghai performances), the second act lake scene uses thirty swans downstage, with eighteen more framing the action. It’s very Busby Berkeley (although Master Raro says that Alexander Gorsky is probably an earlier Russian precedent for the inflated numbers).
As the Brits would say, the resultant theatrical pudding has been somewhat over-egged. Deane was once the director of the English National Ballet, which stages certain of its big productions in the immensity of London’s Royal Albert Hall, so he has experience with massive forces and large theatrical effects. I was largely unimpressed, since grandeur is not so much a product of hordes (something the Chinese may currently dream about, what with their under-population crisis) as an evocation of relative scale and the ability to build a statement out of dance varieties in theatrical style and tonal register. Almost all of the character dances in Deane’s third act ballroom scene ended weakly: hollow booms predominated. And in the fourth act lakeside scene, the busy regiments of swanlets detracted from the private drama of attempted reconciliation between Odette and Siegfried.
This weakness in sensed effect has to do with the way the production’s mime and dance are reduced to the same expressive level. The Chinese see the dance as serving a mimetic tonal register. And the storytelling (in modern Russian fashion) is raced through, a perfect fit for the telegraphic pulse of this restless production. Attention to such distinctions may not matter to Deane or the Shanghai dancers. For example, the act one female guests celebrate on pointe. The rise to the magical ballerina-swan realm via toe work in act two’s lakeside scene is thus nothing special. Stylistic registers are blurred or obviated throughout. Master noted that Deane’s supplemental choreography regularly pinches academic steps in the phrasing (especially pas de chats and pas de bourrées). They have no special texture since they become over-rushed connectives.
Our ballerina Qi Bingxue had long lines but didn’t use her turnout in fast allegro passages; as a result, foot positions and legwork become inconvenient. Our handsome Siegfried, Wu Husheng, has line but no variety of attack, so everything flattens in his dance dynamic. In the fourth act, when Siegfried asks Odette for forgiveness, we almost got a full prostration. Very orientale?
Dance unison is interesting only if it is difficult to achieve. When in act two the entire thirty-ballerina Shanghai corps descended from pointe to flat foot without real control, their unison landing is an unattractive “splat”. Deane uses the extra complement of corps dancers as decorative borders for his central tableaux. The eighteen extras don’t move much, except to run to place and pose. The monolithic ensemble also reduces the apparent scale of the lead dancers. I could almost hear echoes of someone (Master says it might be Valda Setterfield) enquiring, “Who is this mosquito?” Indeed, we are far from the heroic Odette-Odiles and Siegfrieds in the Russian tradition. These Chinese characters are good proles to a fault.
At the end of act three, as Odile raced offstage and Siegfried rushed after her, the Koch Theater audience undoubtedly thought of today’s Meghan Markle heading for Canada with Prince Harry in full pursuit. There was a difference, however. Our stage Queen Mother advanced up the ballroom stairway and then fell full length in despair. How different from the behavior of England’s long-suffering monarch (a Queen Grandmother) under similar circumstances.
At the strong urging of Cheryl and Sandy, Master and I went to see the film 1917. I was resistant at first because the movie was described to me as one more example of the Mortification Movie, a new genre in which a lead character endures multiple indignities, many of them physical. You know the type: Gravity, The Babadook, The Nightengale, The Revenant, Hereditary, Midsommer, The Lighthouse. Not only is the protagonist put through a term of extreme physical abuse, the viewer must suffer as well. (Actually, the ploy is an old one: think of the way Brando’s Fletcher Christian becomes toast by the end of the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty. Certain actors and actresses like to suffer on screen.) But 1917 turns out to be more than that, and we thank C. and S. for their tip. Master and I were fascinated by how the script (by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and the director Sam Mendes) relies on classic conventions of British war films while locating new relations between the inherited tropes. The clichés are not only visualized freshly with a constantly moving camera; but, surprisingly, they are allowed to reinforce one another in the realization.
1917 has a literate script, and by that I don’t just mean the expressive economy of the spoken dialogue but the poetic incorporation of set-pieces that describe the new kind of warfare that World War One represented to troops on the ground. As a result, today’s young audiences can discover the pleasures of movie literacy at a time when such knowledge is often missing from criticism, especially the highly inclusive arts pages of the New York Times. (The Times reviewer was much too impressed with Roger Deakins’ extraordinary camerawork to notice the script’s contribution.)
Spoiler Alert. I am now going to talk about the narrative events of the film in such a way that anyone who has not seen it will have to forego the pleasures of discovery in a movie theater if he continues reading. So, beware: you know who you are and goodbye perchance for now. The through-line of 1917 is to be found in the education of Lance Corporal Schofield (played bravely by George MacKay) as he is forced by events to give up his battle-hardened cynicism through participation in a near-suicidal rescue mission. He initially makes light of a ribbon he has won for earlier valor in the war and even denigrates ironically the heroism of his partner, Lance Corporal Blake (played by Dean-Charles Chapman), who has saved Schofield’s life in an underground wire-trap detonation. Circumstances intervene to alter Schofield’s perspective on the two-man mission and his experience of warfare.
Against time (afternoon, night, morning), the men’s mission is to alert a British battalion to a German trap that would decimate sixteen hundred troops. (Blake’s older brother is one of the soldiers poised for the morning attack.) Despite the steady forward movement of Roger Deakins’ camera, the movie alters its style with a scripted and visual intelligence that allows the viewer to understand Schofield’s change from cynicism to something closer to personal investment in his mission. He and we understand this experience in a new way by the end of the film.
Let me provide an example of the manner in which we are taken in new tonal directions by the movie. Soon after Schofield’s resurrection from the near-fatal explosion underground, he and Blake come upon an abandoned French cherry tree orchard in full, brief bloom, despite having been chopped down by departing German forces. Blake comments on the variety of cherry tree species. It is possible that he has knowledge of the importation to England of such species by Algernon Freeman-Mitford to be eventually incorporated toward the display of varieties at the Batsford Arboretum in Gloucestershire. (Freeman-Mitford helped rescue certain cherry species by transporting them from Japan to England. His son David was the father of the Mitford sisters.) The brief visit of the two British soldiers to the French farm is therefore a reminder of home and of English botanical genius. The motif of cherry blossoms returns toward the end of 1917.
The early scenes of the movie document World War One in its trench warfare aspects through a dangerous trek across a No Man’s Land. The view is objective, the evidence gathered as phenomenological as in a movie by Bresson. (I’m thinking of A Man Escaped.) But the tone and point of view begin to shift when the men come upon an abandoned farmhouse. “I have a bad feeling about this place,” Schofield remarks, and it is here that the film makes a decisive turn into a more subjective selection of data. It is here that the “subjective” aspect of the continuous camerawork works its true wonders. Trying to save the life of a German fighter pilot, Blake is stabbed and dies in Schofield’s arms. When he is picked up by a passing British transport unit, Schofield listens to the banter of the British conscripts from the distance of traumatic shock – the movie is brilliant in the way it shows this while situated in the back of a truck filled with the cynical troops. When the vehicle becomes stuck in mud, Schofield leads a group of the men to get it rolling again, and we sense that this action pulls him out of his shock over the deaths in which he has participated at the farm. (If he had not separated from his partner to obtain water for the enemy pilot, Blake might not have been stabbed.)
In the following sequence showing Schofield surviving a sniper attack in the bombed village of Écoust-Saint-Mein, there is an equivalent turn toward the reality principle. But in the fight Schofield sustains a head wound, falling backwards from a ricocheting bullet, and when he awakens he finds night has fallen on a ruined townscape nightmarishly illuminated from bomb strikes and flares. It’s like a nocturnal de Chirico phantasmagoria. We can take a resultant chase sequence and an encounter with a young French woman and a foundling as the partial result of the soldier’s concussion, disorientation, and blackout. It is an unforgettable photographic nightmare. Once again, the style of the film has shifted into a subjective register.
To escape his German pursuers (he is now without a rifle), Schofield drops into a rapids-filled river. The movie suggests that the only thing that rescues him from drowning is the presiding memory of Blake’s death. As he floats down the river holding onto a floating branch, cherry trees lining the stream release their blossoms upon the waters. There is something sacramental about this floral baptism. In a sense, Blake saves Schofield’s life a second time. In order to reach the banks of the river, he must climb over the massed bodies of dead troops who have drifted down the stream, like the short-lived cherry blossoms. Schofield enters a wood, where British troops are awaiting orders. A lone soldier there sings a cappella the American folk song “Wayfaring Stranger”. This is highly unrealistic, of course. (One thinks of the more plausible German song that moves the troops at the end of Paths of Glory.) But the film has now earned the right to venture into such lyric commentary, so seamlessly has it bound itself to the personal vision of Schofield.
The climactic action sequence of 1917 is a realistic bomb-bursting gauntlet that Schofield must run in order to deliver the order to stop the attack to the Colonel leading the British forces. The scene is powerful because Mendes and Wilson-Cairns have waited until this point to unleash a full depiction of the mechanized war technology that made World War One a new event in human destructive capability. We see how lethal a modern war has become for troops. The personal drama and the objective landscape now merge, producing a true grandeur that is held in suspension by the film. We still don’t know how the story will end. Yet something immense has been evoked. By the movie’s conclusion, Schofield is no longer a cynic, or rather his view of the war’s meanings has been expanded beyond the personal. Cynicism may be one component, but only one influence toward his thought. The last we see of Schofield, our warrior has taken a quick look at photographs of his wife and children. There will be more battles on the morrow.
1917 achieves its sense of immense scale through carefully discriminated shifts in tone and style. Its import is more than a matter of numbers.
This is Britain’s memorial film for the centennial of War World One. From New Zealand, the director Peter Jackson contributed They Shall Not Grow Old, a restorative documentary honoring the soldiers who fought in the Great War. The Imperial War Museum was the source of Jackson’s found footage. Where was the work which the American film industry and our governmental institutions contributed to the centennial? How shaming if the answer is none.
There is currently no production of Swan Lake in the international repertory that does justice to that foundational work. More shame.
Louise must decide how to use Sandy’s skills. Should he be made ballet master of her revived company, with Cheryl as choreographer in residence? (Louise says there is currently no large ballet company around the world which possesses a plausible ballet master at its head.) Or should it be vice versa? And how to let Mme Beach and Albertine and Paco know about Sandy’s advent? These political maneuvers have to be handled in the right way. Louise now has secret weapons – two young American classical choreographers – and how to spring them on the world is the question.
P.H.
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