When director Isabelle Stever says about "Grand Jeté,” her Berlinale Panorama premiere, “it’s physically intense,” it is an understatement. And it is not pretty either, neither physically nor psychologically. Still the film, for what it is, in the oddest ways --that inexplicably include a porcelain dog as well as a real stray-- works and makes sense. The two lead actors are pitch-perfect in their taciturn, relentless and borderless radicality, from the close-ups of cracking back and bloody feet to the pressure-cooker of artistic ambition to out-of-control desire.
Saturday, February 12. 2022
Berlinale 2022: Grand Jeté #review
When director Isabelle Stever says about "Grand Jeté,” her Berlinale Panorama premiere, “it’s physically intense,” it is an understatement. And it is not pretty either, neither physically nor psychologically. Still the film, for what it is, in the oddest ways --that inexplicably include a porcelain dog as well as a real stray-- works and makes sense. The two lead actors are pitch-perfect in their taciturn, relentless and borderless radicality, from the close-ups of cracking back and bloody feet to the pressure-cooker of artistic ambition to out-of-control desire.
For ballet dancers in this “Grand Jeté" world, it is the (battered and abused) bodies that count, between torture and ecstasy, pushed well past the limit, for pleasure and pain. Only after five minutes do we get to see the protagonist’s face. Nadja had estranged herself from her young son Mario in order to be able to concentrate on her successful ballet career. When she meets the now teenager again at a family party, a mutual fascination and affection springs up that instantly and unquestionably exceeds (or perhaps sidesteps) motherly love. Nadja conceived Mario, we learn, while on the pill but vomiting for weight control. We are presented with a challenging mother-son relationship between self-realization and the restraints and responsibilities of role expectations. American, Berlin-based actress, dancer, and choreographer Sarah Nevada Grether is Nadja; Emil von Schönfels (Monuments Men; You Are Wanted; Sense8: Babylon Berlin), at 20, is Mario in this chamber play based on the yet untranslated novel “Fürsorge” (Caring) by Anke Stelling.
The pair’s rapprochement, naturally, is bodily and sensual. “The film doesn’t show Mario necessarily as a victim nor Nadja as an offender,” the filmmaker commented. "The audience can expect to have their moral assumptions challenged.” It speaks to Stever’s craftswomanship that she manages to make the inappropriate quality and expression of the connection worth following (if you have the patience for the protagonist). Nadja remains an enigma with mood swings and an opaque family back story. We can deduct little explanation and yet we follow her and the lure of the indirect camera, dreamlike partial views and seductive club music.
If you can take the transgressions --post-coital in-bed homework checks and public penis weight-lifting fantasies are the least of it--, you will slowly find a woman questioning choices and a young man taking what he can get from the world and then some. “We all get what we deserve,” states Nadja’s mother plainly. Can Nadja use a second chance to do better this time around?
Isabelle Stever, born 1963 in Munich, studied math then film in Berlin and it shows in the way she combines formal precision and tender boundlessness in her films, like she is trying to get the measure of a shy deer. She came to prominence with her most recent features “Blessed Events” about a dysfunctional family setting between happiness and horror (a TIFF 2010 world premiere) and the 2015 "The Weather Inside,” also dealing with an age-gap affair and questions of control, power, dependency, need and longing.
“Nothing is behind you, nothing in front of you. That’s your grand jeté" explains Nadja to her whipped students right from the start. The movement literally being a jump in which a dancer springs from one foot to land on the other with one leg forward and the other stretched backward, suspended in the air.
“Dance for me,” Mario says. “You cannot dance for someone,” Nadja responds. “Then just dance."
by @JuttaBrendemuhl
image courtesy Brave New Work
The pair’s rapprochement, naturally, is bodily and sensual. “The film doesn’t show Mario necessarily as a victim nor Nadja as an offender,” the filmmaker commented. "The audience can expect to have their moral assumptions challenged.” It speaks to Stever’s craftswomanship that she manages to make the inappropriate quality and expression of the connection worth following (if you have the patience for the protagonist). Nadja remains an enigma with mood swings and an opaque family back story. We can deduct little explanation and yet we follow her and the lure of the indirect camera, dreamlike partial views and seductive club music.
If you can take the transgressions --post-coital in-bed homework checks and public penis weight-lifting fantasies are the least of it--, you will slowly find a woman questioning choices and a young man taking what he can get from the world and then some. “We all get what we deserve,” states Nadja’s mother plainly. Can Nadja use a second chance to do better this time around?
Isabelle Stever, born 1963 in Munich, studied math then film in Berlin and it shows in the way she combines formal precision and tender boundlessness in her films, like she is trying to get the measure of a shy deer. She came to prominence with her most recent features “Blessed Events” about a dysfunctional family setting between happiness and horror (a TIFF 2010 world premiere) and the 2015 "The Weather Inside,” also dealing with an age-gap affair and questions of control, power, dependency, need and longing.
“Nothing is behind you, nothing in front of you. That’s your grand jeté" explains Nadja to her whipped students right from the start. The movement literally being a jump in which a dancer springs from one foot to land on the other with one leg forward and the other stretched backward, suspended in the air.
“Dance for me,” Mario says. “You cannot dance for someone,” Nadja responds. “Then just dance."
by @JuttaBrendemuhl
image courtesy Brave New Work
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
