8 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday 27 February 2020

ARTS

BegoñaCaoperformsAshton’s‘FiveBrahmsWaltzes’— David Scheinmann

Louise Levene

Isadora Duncan despised ballet —

shecalled it “mechanical and vulgar”

— but it has often been ballet dancers

and choreographers who have kept her

flame alive. Former Royal Ballet star

Viviana Durante is the latest Duncan

convert, mounting a programme of

three works that attempt to revive, imi-

tate or simply embody the spirit of the

great American pioneer.

Duncan’s minimalist decors, her use

of “serious” music and her deeply felt,

Dionysian responses to her scores were

all widely imitated. But while the list of

her admirers — Stanislavsky, Duse,

Rodin, Ashton — obliges us to infer her

greatness, the Chinese whisper of

dances taught by the “Isadorables” and

those who followed never quite conjure

the fragrance of the original. (Or so we

hope and trust: if they are faithful copies

then she really wasn’t terribly good.)

Isadora Nowkicks off with a restaging

of 1911’sDance of the Furies, set to Gluck’s

Orfeo. The 10-minute piece places us

firmly in Duncanville — an animated

Grecian urn of barefoot ladies in “diaph-

anous draperies” — but the quintet,

staged by veteran Duncanist Barbara

Kane, never really rises above witches-

in-Macbeth levels and doesn’t approxi-

mate what a contemporary writer

described as an “expression of concen-

trated venom and malice”.

When Frederick Ashton saw Duncan

in 1921 he was still a teenager and the

legendary soloist was an overripe 44.

Her preferred diet of ortolans and Pom-

mery 1911 had begun to take its toll —

“How can one dance on lemonade?”, she

said — and there were frequent ward-

robe malfunctions. But Ashton was cap-

tivated nonetheless. With his near-

eidetic memory for movement he was

able to create a Duncan solo for Lynn

Seymour more than 50 years later.

Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of

Isadora Duncanwas danced on Tuesday

by former English National Ballet prin-

cipal Begoña Cao and staged by Camille

Andriot (herself coached by Seymour).

Ashton’s chief recollection was of Dun-

can’s “enormous grace and enormous

power” and of a run in which “she left

herself behind”. Cao strikes the right

note of joyous abandon with an ecstatic

circuit of the stage, three metres of chif-

fon billowing in her wake.

Undais a ritualistic “after Duncan”

sextet by Joy Alpuerto Ritter with live

cello accompaniment by Lih Qun Wong

and a wispy wardrobe of wonky beige

chiffons. At 40 minutes the piece

dragged in places, but while it couldn’t

boast the two-degrees-of-separation of

the first two numbers, it managed to

capture the improvisatory intensity

that set Duncan apart.

Simple multiplication was not a fea-

ture of the sequences that Duncan

devised for her acolytes, and Ritter

offers only the most relaxed unison

groupings, taking care to retain and

exploit her dancers’ individual quirks

and gifts. Nikita Goile displays a lus-

ciously bendy back and vivid stage pres-

ence that make you wonder what she

might have made ofBrahms Waltzes.

Alpuerto Ritter, a former Akram Khan

dancer, moves among the women,

prompting and sustaining individual

movements and adding to the mysteri-

ous and beguiling mood of the all-female

ensemble. As Duncan put it: “The

dancer will not dance in the form of

nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette...she

shall dance the freedom of woman.”

To February 29, barbican.org.uk

What would Isadora Duncan do?

DANCE

Isadora Now

Barbican, London

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A

s the aftershocks rumble on

fromParasite’s Oscar wins

— who could have guessed

Donald Trump would have

an opinion? — another

supremely good film is here to help

native English speakers over what

director Bong Joon-Ho called “the one-

inch-tall barrier of subtitles”. This time,

the reward isPortrait of a Lady on Fire,

directed by French film-maker Céline

Sciamma. Her last movie,Girlhood,

dazzled from the Paris banlieues. Now,

she has us in a rowboat, pitching on

open water in the company of Marianne

(Noémie Merlant), a sober young

painter whose canvases tip overboard.

Instantly, she braves the sea to rescue

them. Later, soaked to the skin on a

jagged island off Brittany, fire would be

a fine thing.

The era is the late 18th century. And

how. Sciamma conjures the past with

such clarity you clean forget the modern

world and the crew crouched in fleeces

and headphones just out of shot. Such,

done right, is the magic of cinema. Mari-

anne, we learn, has been summoned by

a wealthy widow. Her wish is simple —

a portrait of her daughter Héloïse to

delight a potential Milanese husband.

Yet thus far other painters have been

unable to execute it. Unable? “She

refused to pose,” her mother explains,

a phrase made to become a slogan. The

only answer is subterfuge. Marianne

must befriend her subject without

revealing sheisher subject.

Sciamma is not above showmanship.

Even when Héloïse finally appears, she

runs from us in a hooded cloak, racing

towards a cliff-edge before spinning

back to camera. She is played, it turns

out, by Adèle Haenel. The casting is

smart — Haenel is a bona fide movie star

and so too is Héloïse, just one alive

a hundred years before the movies.

Marianne takes a breath, then devotes

the coming weeks to sly studies of the

woman to whom she is supposedly a

paid companion — her cheekbones,

hairline, the cartilage of her ear and,

when her face is shrouded with scarves,

her eyes. Héloïse gazes back. The first

kiss is a matter of time.

All this may sound like parody, a riot

of smouldering glances, an arthouse

staring contest. In fact, between the

secret assignment and the doubly secret

affair, the drama is enough to stall the

breath. But yes, the film is also great on

the electric minutiae of how people fall

for one another — the endless power of

sex and connection across sexualities

and centuries. Sciamma should know.

She is in love herself, with all the possi-

bilities of film. This is her Valentine.

Welcome to Victoria, Australia circa

1867, the Wild West gone south, starting

point of Justin Kurzel’sTrue History of

the Kelly Gang. The landscape alone

might make you jumpy, a vista of dirt

and stump trees, the air thick with the

screech of unseen birds. No country for

old men or anyone else, this strange,

feral place has given rise to the strange,

feral Edward “Ned” Kelly, played first as

a 12-year-old by Orlando Schwerdt. Fate

soon leaves him fatherless, installed as

the man of the house — but not quite

head of the family. That role belongs to

his mother Ellen (Essie Davis),

a barbed-wire matriarch who yanks

away the chance of an education.

Schooling comes instead with an

apprenticeship to bushranger Harry

Power (Russell Crowe), who buys the

boy a splendid dinner and leaves him

spattered with the blood of an ambush

victim. “That’s the business, mate,” he

shrugs. Oh, one more thing: “Don’t leave

it for the English to tell your story.”

The film is as good as its word, this

version of the Kelly legend based on the

Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter

Carey. From there, it has been filtered

through Kurzel, a director you would

not expect to find working for Pixar

anytime soon. His first film wasSnow-

town, an abyssal account of Australia’s

infamous “bodies-in-barrels” murders,

his second a notably severeMacbeth.

Yet for all the blood on the floor, the

mood is more than just brutal. Instead,

once Kelly comes of age — played now

by George MacKay, last seen being very

English indeed in Sam Mendes’s 1917 —

we get something woozy and teasing,

a cult movie in waiting. Now joined by

his younger brother, Kelly and a band

of strays go about their robberies in

lace-and-frill dresses, the better to

spook the constabulary.

The sense of hype in the air is half the

point in a story about self-invention.

Kurzel isn’t so literal minded as to cast a

rock star to play his Kelly, unlike the

1970 version starring a discomfited

Mick Jagger. Still, this Ned, found off-

duty in a skinny red shirt and kitchen-

scissors haircut, could easily be the

bassist in a forgotten punk band. Strik-

ing poses under a Union Jack, MacKay

channels Iggy Pop while Kurzel nods to

the Sex Pistols, lost boys from an age yet

to come, caught like Kelly between

myth and the record.

The environmental thrillerDark

Watersbegins in 1975, otherwise known

as the year ofJaws. The significance is

not lost on director Todd Haynes, whose

first scene finds a gaggle of excitable

teens frolicking in a fenced off

waterhole. It could be a landlocked

double for Spielberg’s opening beach

party. InJaws, however, Amity Island

criedshark!Here, no one rings the alarm

for another generation.

The film is based on a true story, and

not a pretty one. Discovery falls to Rob-

ert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a tamped-

down Cincinnati attorney we meet in

1998 being welcomed as a partner by

Midwestern law firm Taft Stettinius &

Hollister. Bilott is no one’s idea of a trou-

blemaker. Buttonholed at the Taft

offices by anguished dairy farmers with

tales of sick cattle and a nearby chemi-

cal plant, he politely refers them else-

where: “Idefendchemical companies.”

But the family connection that brought

them to him in the first place is enough

to inspire a journey to Parkersburg,

West Virginia.

There, sure enough, he finds dying

animals — but also kids who smile with

blackened teeth and parents with

coughs that end up in biopsies. The

entire local economy relies on chemical

titan DuPont; the something that is

clearly deeply wrong is a mystery. None-

theless, Bilott begins to dig. What he

finds are PFOAs, the “forever chemi-

cals” used in non-stick cookware,

among many other things, statistically

almost certain to be in your blood-

stream too. The company, now

branding itself as New DuPont, has cried

foul over the film, without pursuing

legal action.

Many of the beats that follow will be

familiar from the long history of movie

whistleblowers and industrial skuldug-

gery. As Sarah Bilott, a corporate lawyer

herself, Anne Hathaway has a bigger

role than many wives before her, but her

chief function is still to panic as her hus-

band appears gripped by paranoia.

Yet the Bilotts make compelling view-

ing, straight arrows losing the scales

from their eyes. Haynes — director of

such lushly bittersweet period dramas

asCarolandFar From Heaven— may feel

a weird fit indeed for a film so bound up

with livestock and legal pads. But if his

best-known movies revisit handsome,

troubled American pasts, here too he

leads us back beyond even 1975. Comb-

ing through endless document boxes,

Bilott stumbles on a DuPont Christmas

card offering festive greetings from 1957

— the sunny peak of postwar America.

A spiritual relic from that hopeful era

himself, sniggered at by colleagues for

still driving a domestically made car, he

squints at it a moment. A couple of

boxes later, a few years down the time-

line, he finds the first in-house medical

studies. And then the first cover-ups.

The look of love and the magic of cinema

Above:AdèleHaenel,left,

andNoémieMerlantin

‘PortraitofaLadyonFire’.

Aboveright:RussellCrowein

‘TrueHistoryoftheKellyGang’

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Céline Sciamma

AAAAE

True History of the Kelly Gang

Justin Kurzel

AAAAE

Dark Waters

Todd Haynes

AAAAE

FILM

Danny

Leigh

MarkRuffaloin‘DarkWaters’