6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday22 August 2019

ARTS

Guangzhou Ballet in ‘Carmina Burana’

Apollinaire Scherr

Ballet arrived late to China — after the

revolution, via the Soviet Union — and

later still to Guangzhou. By the time the

southern city could boast its own

troupe, in 1993, socialist realism had

come and gone. By now — assuming the

newly minted pieces on its first New

York visit are representative — the

large, handsome Guangzhou Ballet

has thoroughly embraced liberalisa-

tion. This programme mixed east and

west, ancient and contemporary,

epic and lyric, as well as the nifty and

the dubious.

Peter Quanz’sGoddess of the Luo River

takes inspiration from an ancient tale of

delayed eternal love. The choreogra-

pher, who runs a small troupe in Van-

couver and freelances widely, estab-

lishes setting with poetic economy. The

female corps describe the river’s rolling

current and swirling eddies in frisky gal-

loping steps and undulating arms. Allu-

sive geometries also map the lovers’ rap-

prochement. First the goddess and poet

dance on opposite sides of the water (a

column of women), then reach and

entwine their arms across the divide,

and eventually occupy the same patch

of light.

But the half-hour, 22-person ballet

lacks crucial drama. In the tale, the poet

doesn’t believe that an immortal would

condescend to love him. Paranoid dis-

trust is a ripe subject for dance, as such

enduring modernist works as Martha

Graham’sCave of the Heart, herMedea,

and José Limón’sOthellotreatment,The

Moor’s Pavane, show. To succeed,

though, Quanz would have had to stop

his ears to his chosen score, Du

Mingxin’s 1982 violin concerto, an

entirely too placid patchwork of effects.

Overriding the music is precisely what

Cincinnati émigré Jiang Qi has done with

Carl Orff’s more irresistibleCarmina

Burana. The hour-long ballet represents

the drinking, lusting and turning of the

seasons laid out in lyrics gleaned from

the 13th century, but it skips the central

preoccupation: inexorable destiny. The

1937 cantata’s gloom is heavy like the

black death, and so is its joy. Jiang is too

busy with his steps to notice.

He adheres to ballet conventions

not as shortcuts to meaning but for

their own sake, introducing romance,

for example, so he can feature a pas

de deux.

The choreography is competent,

attractive, trendily gymnastic and

mindless. It brings out a similar weak-

ness in the well-trained dancers, who

regularly execute phrases as if reciting

words they didn’t understand.

The major exception comes in the all-

male episodes. The men stream on stage

and hurtle themselves to the floor or

hurl themselves into the air. As they sail

up, then pause as if bolstered by a cloud,

these impressive jumpers are rough-

edged enough to remind us of the

ground they have left behind. Finally

dancing attuned to its music.

en.caeg.cn

East and west, epic and lyric

DANCE

Guangzhou Ballet

Lincoln Center, New York

aaaee

A

s I watched Pedro Almodó-

var’sPain and Glory, the

phrase “devices and

desires” kept coming into

my head. It may be a hal-

lowed commonplace for some (from the

1662 Book of Common Prayer to a 1989

P.D. James title). But for movie review-

ers the phrase is a gift from heaven: the

perfect torch to seek out truthful

appraisal. It defines exactly what makes

Almodóvar, and other film-makers,

great when they are; and not so great

when they aren’t.

Desires are what drive the Spanish

master to his masterpieces:All About My

Mother,Volver,Talk to Her. Desire to tell

a story and give it meaning. Desire to

enrich that story poetically and colour it

emotionally, even romantically. (The

word stood bold in the title of one of his

first art house hits,Law of Desire.)

Devices are what Almodóvar and others

reach for when desire is weak and crea-

tive will unwilling.

Pain and Glorywants to be8½but

seemed to me about six-and-a-quarter.

A self-portrait too often self-conscious

in the wrong way, it has one wonderful

scenic idea, presented early and punctu-

ating the story. That’s the cave house

dwelt in by young Salvador, alter ego for

young Pedro, and his mother, played by

a Penélope Cruz doing at times the full

Sophia Loren.

From this palaeo-Platonist womb of a

home — “You live in catacombs like the

ancient Christians,” declares the village

holy woman — grow the hero’s soul,

being and imagination. They grow like

the sun conquering darkness. That

becomes semi-literal, and comically

cataclysmic, in one sequence of nearly

solar sexual epiphany.

But the grown Salvador, whose life is

interspliced with his younger self’s, is

played by a mannered Antonio

Banderas falling back on too much wry,

editorialising face language. That is the

devil with autobiographical heroes. Too

often they are a one-man commentariat

responding to others instead of radiat-

ing their own selves. In the vision field of

the adult Salvador/Pedro, everything

starts to seem self-regardingly

“devised”, including the two main plots

involving memory invocation.

In one an actor and former friend

(Asier Etxeandia) stage-enacts an auto-

biographical monologue written by Sal-

vador. This is perilously like one of those

Greenwich Village “me dramas” once

spoofed by the likes of Paul Mazursky.

In the other plot an old gay flame (Leon-

ardo Sbaraglia) revisits the protagonist,

pushing us to find a poignancy we feel

only in the head, not in the heart.

With this director, personal memory

surely functions better when subli-

mated into outright, outsize fiction.

Those are the Almodóvar works

we love: the films that put styled extrav-

agance before studied calculation,

poetic boldness before picayune self-

examination. Summed up: desires

before devices, or devices (if we are to

have them) enriched and made vivid

by desire.

The documentary Hail Satan?

reminded me of the great dialogue

exchange inThe Wild One(1953). To a

character asking bike-gang leader Mar-

lon Brando what he is rebelling against,

Brando replies, “What have you got?”

It could be the unstated motto of The

Satanic Temple, the group of American

religious contrarians featured in Penny

Lane’s film. They are led by Lucien

Greaves, an unblinking, scary, weirdly

charismatic guy with a blanched and

dilated pupil in his right eye. (Is that eye

real or a make-up effect? I started to

want to know.)

“Refining Satanism and making it a

weapon in the ongoing culture wars.”

Mission statements come no better at a

time when evangelists and other God

groupies are propping up a national

leader charged with racism, sexism,

xenophobia, treason...

The Satanic Temple’s irony-armed

crusaders don’t actually practise black

magic, sacrifice or devil worship. They

just affirm the reasoned, reasonable

attitude expressed by one acolyte: “I

want to be the opposite of what these

people are.”

The US never gave God a significant

place in its constitution in the first place,

Hail Satan?points out. It has since smug-

gled Him into everything from congres-

sional oaths to dollar bills. How hearten-

ing to watch Team Lucien’s campaign to

erect a statue of goat-headed Baphomet

(a Satan alter ego) next to a proposed

Ten Commandments monument out-

side one city’s capitol building — and the

city’s subsequent backing-off from the

Decalogue block.

A different, no less eloquently polem-

ical passage argues that the Garden of

Eden apple was a symbol not of human-

ity’s fall but of its greatest enduring gift:

free will. Way to go! Is membership of

this group still open?

Gators to the left of them; gators to the

right; and sometimes gators all around.

But onward stagger, struggle, or in rising

waters swim the gallant father-daughter

duo trapped in the crawlspace beneath a

flooding home. It’s quite a crawlspace in

Crawl: the size of an average meeting

hall. But living quarters are built above

ground in parts of Florida. High water

tables; major hurricane seasons. The

hurricane here — thanks to the digitisa-

tion folk — is a beauty.

Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper

have the action virtually to themselves.

Everyone else becomes alligator chow.

In moments spared from the monsters,

the two main characters shovel in back-

story — about the family, about growing

up, about swimming scholarships — like

stokers bunging in coal. It’s never quite

enough. Dad and daughter are just well-

acted ciphers shrieking at the true

scene-stealers. Outside: that is the

weather. Inside: it is the swishy,

corrugated, murder-eyed mega-lizards,

CGI’d so skilfully they look more real

than the real.

Morgan Freeman is adrift on a lake;

he is incapable of swift manoeuvre; he is

an almost stationary target for hunters

or shooters. Isn’t that the definition of a

lame duck president? This one is

awayday-ing from the White House to

pow-wow on a fishing boat with chief

bodyguard Gerard Butler. Guess what

happens next?

Angel Has FallenisOlympus Has Fallen

in all but name and enhanced inanity.

There is something divertingly cuckoo

about the number of bullets, explosions

and vehicle crashes Butler can survive

and still present at the close a silver sal-

ver, as it were, holding the message

“Franchise intact, milord.”

The plot, thunderously eventful, is no

less thunderously predictable. You can

sniff out the “surprise” villain in the first

reel. You could script the last reel your-

self, an hour before you see it.

Self-portrait of Almodóvar, man and boy

Above: Nora Navas and Antonio

Banderas in ‘Pain and Glory’.

Below: Kaya Scodelario in ‘Crawl’

FILM

Nigel

Andrews

Pain and Glory

Pedro Almodóvar

AAAAE

Hail Satan?

Penny Lane

AAAAE

Crawl

Alexandre Aja

AAAEE

Angel Has Fallen

Ric Roman Waugh

AAEEE

ARTS ONLINE

Antonio Banderas

talks to Raphael

Abraham about

playing

Almodóvar, ‘Pain

and Glory’ and

leaving

Hollywood

ft.com/arts

Satanists rally in ‘Hail Satan?’

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