It’s inspired and sweetly moving (you
feel her liberation), but too little too
late for a movie that otherwise obeys
all costume drama conventions.
It is, however, Citizen Kane
when compared with Mainstream
({((((), the latest directorial effort
from Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia
Coppola). A horrifically empty “social
media satire” (yeah, right), it stars
Maya Hawke (sporting mum Uma
Thurman’s voice and father Ethan
Hawke’s cheekbones) as an, ahem,
“online content creator” called
Frankie who falls for the oddly named
Link, who is an absolute spanner
played by Andrew Garfield at his
most untrammelled and, alas, odious.
Link is a modern-day “seer” who
doesn’t own a phone, is very wacky
and challenges Frankie with lines such
as, “Do you want to make art or do
you want to seek affirmation from
faceless strangers?” In restaurants
Link sits under tables, instead of next
to them (that’s for squares!). He’s the
male equivalent of the Manic Pixie
Dream Girl (think Zooey Deschanel
in 500 Days of Summer) and you’ll
mostly want to punch him.
The director Abel Ferrara arrived
Meaghan Grace Hinkis
and David DonnellyRoyal Ballet dancers
make a welcome return
grace and beautiful placement to a
brief segment of John Neumeier’s
yearning Nocturnes; and Edward
Watson showed a liquid, cat-like
luxuriance as he danced Javier de
Frutos’s One with D in shorts that
revealed those extraordinary thigh
muscles working at full capacity.
With a 90-minute programme
stuffed with an overture plus
17 dance pieces, it was perhaps
inevitable that we’d feel a bit rushed
through things — the tiny burst of
David Donnelly and Teo Dubreuil’s
soaring, synchronised performance
clipped from Christopher Wheeldon’s
Within the Golden Hour left you
feeling particularly bereft. And the
all-too-brief Suite by Valentino
Zucchetti, danced by Leo Dixon,
showed us a first artist to watch.
The longest work was Dane Hurst’s
contemporary piece What Remains,
danced by him and his real-life
partner, the Royal Ballet soloist
Romany Pajdak. It was a sombre,
angsty duet, full of off-axis work,
expressively spanning ideas of fear,
loss, love and acceptance. Not
groundbreaking, but finely danced
— however, if the immediate future
of contemporary choreography is
responses to the pandemic, we’re in
for an awfully glum time. Calvin
Richardson seemed to have had
more fun in lockdown, coming up
with Bird of Paradise with Joshua
Junker, a loose, funky hoe-down of
a solo built round Hot Knife by
Mountain Man, with Richardson
melting into the music with real glee.
As for Hinkis, after a divinely
delicate pas de deux from Onegin
with Donnelly, where the pair
seemed to float on the notes, she
closed the evening dancing a warmly
consoling solo from MacMillan’s
Requiem — a perfect choice.A
fter six months of not
setting foot on their home
stage at the Royal Opera
House, an intrepid bunch
of Royal Ballet dancers,
from principals to first artists, led by
the American soloist Meaghan Grace
Hinkis, decided enough was enough.
Hinkis’s heroic efforts secured them
a venue, staging, two pianists and a
cellist and sponsors in under a month
— and a weekend of gala shows
to raise money for struggling
performing artists was the result.
The grounds of Athelhampton,
a Dorset Tudor manor house with
Thomas Hardy connections, gardens
created by Inigo Jones and a resident
bevy of white doves, had been offered
for this first public performance
by Covent Garden’s dancers since
March 12. Well, maybe not first for
all the dancers; Marianela Nuñez,
appearing on the canopied stage
in floaty grey chiffon ruffled by the
evening breeze, danced a piece she
performed in Sicily last month.
Moonlight, choreographed by Erico
Montes to Debussy’s Clair de Lune,
and full of expansive arms and
ecstatic pas de bourrée, was a
charming way to start; the look of
rapture on her face was thrilling.
Nuñez got the biggest showing
of the night, bringing glittering
precision to the fan-wielding Kitri
variation from Act III of Don
Quixote — plus a smile that lit up
the evening — and delivering an
imperious Raymonda variation
in the second half.
Not to be out-tutu’d,
Yasmine Naghdi
performed a firecracker
Esmeralda variation, a
piece of marvellous Petipa
pointework showboating
that involved her hitting
a tambourine extended
above her head with her
foot, repeatedly, on the
beat (she did it perfectly).
She was also the sassy,
hip-swinging, top-hatted
star of the ensemble
piece from Kenneth
MacMillan’s Elite
Syncopations.
Of the other three
Royal Ballet principals
on the bill, we caught
only fleeting glimpses.
Laura Morera was
wistfully teasing in a
snippet from Jerome
Robbins’s Dances at
a Gathering; Akane
Takada brought perfectDance
Athelhampton Ballet Gala
Athelhampton Manor,
Dorset
{{{{(Their theatre may be closed, but that didn’t stop
them staging their own show, says Siobhan Murphy
MARILYN KINGWILLthe times | Monday September 7 2020 1GT 9
arts
VIVO FILMSRomola Garai in Miss Marx. Far left:
Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman.
Left: Greta Thunberg in I Am Gretamidway through the festival, and
appeared briefly and nervously
on stage (he said he didn’t feel
comfortable being indoors because
of Covid) to introduce his truly
god-awful documentary Sportin’ Life
({((((). It was mostly made during
a press junket for his previous movie
flop Siberia at the Berlin Film Festival
this year and it’s as if he assembled
roughly 90 minutes of footage,
whacked it all into a blender and
then flung the results over the screen.
The far superior documentary was
I Am Greta ({{{{(), which was a
fascinating “year in the life of” the eco
warrior Greta Thunberg and followed
her around (from school strike protests
to UN meetings) with such fly-on-the-
wall intimacy that three facts became
incontrovertible. 1. She writes her own
speeches and is seen chastising her
father, Svante, when he tries to help.- She is tiny and vulnerable, and at
several points in the film we are shown
how her Asperger’s affects everything
she does (can’t do small talk,
sometimes freezes into long silences,
forgets to eat, really struggles).
And 3. Politicians are just awful.
Emmanuel Macron is shown to be a
patronising fool, Jean-Claude Juncker
a self-regarding hypocrite and John
Bercow a dealer in platitudes.
Thunberg joined the festival press
conference from school via FaceTime,
then left after 25 minutes, saying,
“I have to go back to class now.”
Which was very Greta and perhaps
the first time in the history of the
Venice Film Festival that a star subject
stormed out of a media engagement to
go back to their lessons. But then this
wasn’t just any normal Venice. And all
the better for it. It was, to borrow
Swinton’s phrase, Venice sublime.
The Venice Film Festival runs to Sep 12