Empire Australasia – July 2019

There was no way

they’d let him see

they were impressed.

RALPH FIENNES’ THIRD film as a
director is his most ambitious to date.
After Shakespearean update Coriolanus
and Charles Dickens love story The
Invisible Woman, The White Crow explores
more recent history — ballet dancer
Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West in
1961 — yet mixes it up in a crosscutting
of timelines, life decisions, visual textures
and hair lengths. It’s a courageous
approach that showcases a host of
interesting scenes but never gels into a
coherent, satisfying whole. By the time the
film straightens itself out into a compelling
last 20 minutes, you can’t help thinking
that simpler might have been better.
So, rather than do a soup-to-nuts
hagiography, Fiennes and writer David
Hare try to interweave three different
strands of the dancer’s life, each with its
own pictorial identity. The major strand,
told in a saturated ’60s style, follows
Nureyev to Paris, ignoring his superior’s
orders and exploring the city, fraternising
with French dancers and getting involved
with sullen socialite Clara Saint (Blue Is
The Warmest Colour’s Exarchopoulos).
Another thread, shot in colder tones,
takes us six years earlier where we see the
nascent star’s talent and arrogance as he
was taken under the wing of Alexander

Pushkin (Fiennes), ballet master of

the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet

— Nureyev is even invited to move in

with Pushkin and his wife (Chulpan

Khamatova), who engages the student

in a different pas de deux. Finally, we get

intermittent glimpses of his childhood,

lensed in monochrome as he is born

on a train and shows some of the

headstrong, loner wilfulness that

shaped his greatness as a dancer.

It’s a bold, tricksy structure but it

is difficult to see what it adds to the

drama, never really intersecting different

time periods in telling ways and often

hindering the momentum, especially in

Paris. It’s all the more frustrating as when

the film moves into the final stretch — the

nuts and bolts of Nureyev seeking asylum

and the actual switch at Paris’ Le Bourget

airport — it finds the tension of a great

’70s political thriller. Fiennes may leave

the reasons for his escape diffuse but the

switch itself is gripping.

If Ivenko is missing some of

Nureyev’s flamboyance, he does better

with his haughtiness. A renowned soloist

in his own right, Ivenko adds credibility

and dynamism to the dance scenes, his

abilities allowing Fiennes to go full Red

Shoes with the camera and not cutaway

to doubles (Black Swan) or digital fakery

(Red Sparrow). Fiennes as Pushkin is

perfectly understated, delivering his entire

role in Russian, but the weakest link is

Exarchopoulos, who gives a withdrawn,

somnambulant performance as the

woman who helps Nureyev defect. Their

relationship leaves a hole where there

should be a beating heart and doesn’t do

much to shine a light on Nureyev. For all

the different angles on show, The White

Crow leaves arguably ballet’s greatest male

dancer frustratingly opaque. IAN FREER

VERDICT An interesting, challenging

mess. The White Crow offers lots that’s

impressive — Ivenko as Nureyev, the

dance sequences, a knuckle-whitening

last 20 minutes — but can’t render it in

a dramatically engaging way.

THE WHITE CROW

DIRECTOR Ralph Fiennes
CAST Oleg Ivenko, Adèle Exarchopoulos,
Ralph Fiennes

PLOT After lowly beginnings being born on
a train in Siberia, Rudolf Nureyev (Ivenko)
rises to be the virtuoso star of Russia’s
Kirov Ballet. Never one to play by the rules,
in 1961, on a groundbreaking tour of Paris,
he makes the decision to seek political
asylum in the west at Le Bourget airport.

OUT 18 JULY
RATED M / 127 MINS
HHH

CHILD’S PLAY

HH

OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 90 MINS

DIRECTOR Lars Klevberg

CAST Aubrey Plaza, Gabriel Bateman,

Brian Tyree Henry, Mark Hamill

AND SO HOLLYWOOD’S obsession

with refurbishing the newest, hippest

plaything from the oldest and tattiest

of parts leads back to 1988’s Child’s

Play. Tom Holland’s original was a fun

killer doll flick that made a star of its

homicidal rubber rascal, Chucky,

led to a fragmented franchise of

varying quality, and by and large

played it straight.

This remake, from director Lars

Klevberg and writer Tyler Burton

Smith, leans into the absurdity of its

premise and, for the first half, treads

a nicely wonky line between comedy

and horror, aided by some fun,

off-kilter dialogue delivery by Aubrey

Plaza, dealer of deadpan, as the

mother of the film’s young hero, Andy.

Then Chucky — voiced by Mark Hamill

— begins to go off the deep end, and

while some of the kills are going to

please gorehounds (even if they’re

largely close-ups of people screaming

and chunks of bloody meat), the film’s

paucity of ideas and budget soon

begin to show. It doesn’t help that

the characters are all unlikeable,

with Andy something of an entitled

douchebag here. As for the star of

the show, Chucky, Hamill is fun, but

saddled with lame, unadventurous

dialogue. The doll itself looks cheap

and unconvincing — while that may

be part of the gag, it doesn’t help

matters when the doll suddenly

has to invoke fear.

But the chief issue is in the

reimagining of Chucky himself as a

robot doll. Removing the supernatural

possession element that powered the

original is all well and good, and there

are nice ideas about Chucky being

able to link up with the cloud and

other devices, but they’re never fully

explored. More fatally, what we have

here is a film populated by people

so dense that they don’t take the

batteries out of the doll the second it

malfunctions. And when that happens,

the film soon malfunctions with it.

Making a killer-doll movie out

of decent component parts should

have been child’s play, but this

misses the mark.

CHRIS HEWITT