Near the beginning of the fifth episode of “etoile”, a very pleasant series that will be released on Thursday in the main video, Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater, is outside the New York film forum, waiting for Gineviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), general director of Le Ballet National in Paris. Marquesina says “Frederick Wiseman's Ballet & La Danse”, two documentaries of the real world about the world of dance of our best documentary filmmaker; The first, from 1995, looks at the American Ballet Theater and the second, of 2009, the Opera Ballet of Paris, the royal institutions whose shadows are thrown on the wall of this comedy, with a dramatic turn or two, by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino.
Wiseman's reference achieves a certain seriousness from the creators, an awareness that people could be observing who knows one or two things about the subject. (And documentary.) Sherman-Palladino, who studied dance from an early age, is already known by fans as the woman behind “Gilmore Girls”, “Bunheads”, which also had a dance issue, and “The wonderful Mrs. Maisel”, which they share with “Étoe” an innate theater; An interest in performance (apart from “Gilmore”); and the verbal rhythms of the prewar ticket comedy.
There are scenes whose dialogue, with a small adjustment, could have served Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, or Carole Lombard and John Barrymore; It is the world as once written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur or Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, but at all, and the combination of shooting in speech and theatrical location, in and around the Lincoln Center in New York and the Palais Garnier and Salle Favart in Paris, does something interesting. Artificial in a way that paradoxically allows something real and identifiable, it is also, in spite of all its air of sophistication, cheesy, sentimental, sweet and sexual without being exactly sexy, all these people really care is their work.
Yanic Truesdale as Raphael, on the left, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Gineviève, the director of Le Ballet National. (Philippe Antonello / Prime)
Luke Kirby plays Jack, the head of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater. (Philippe Antonello / Prime)
Establishing the series in motion is a proposal of Geneviève that, to combat its mutual afflictions (aged audiences, sales of slow tickets after pandemic and progressive cultural irrelevance), their company and Jack would accept to change some main talents, generate advertising and emotion on both sides of the Atlantic. The bill for any cost will be collected by Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), a rich balletomano that Jack considers “the devil” and whose elegant and elegant delivery denies the fact that it is a weapon manufacturer (and delivered the praise at the funeral of Rush Limbaugh); Friend and/or enemy, will enter and leave action as an inexplicable comic wildcard.
Changed to Paris is Mishi duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), the daughter of the French cultural minister; After being cut from the Ballet School of the French company, it has become a prominent soloist in New York and is now being repatriated, for disgust, and that of the dancers who consider it a “baby of the nepos”, even if they cannot pronounce it properly. Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick, a veterinarian of “Maisel”), a choreographer who is asked to accept as an innovative genius, and whose exhaustive eccentricity plays silently and quietly, as if the world surrounding it is also marketed, in the limited degree it understands, is out of place. A kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also appear, which are not the only characters that disappear quickly once a minor point has become.
He is heading west to Manhattan is Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), the star dancer of the company of Paris, her “Étoile”, who had previously given a splash as a guest artist in New York. (She, like Gineviève, has some old sub-romantic businesses with Jack). First we know it in a stormy sea like an ecowarrior, attacking a ship that fish illegally and then arrested us. Cheyenne's intensity, often indistinguishable from anger, can border the comic, but of Laâge offers a total and total performance; She sits, finds and walks like a dancer (although she also has a double for dances) and makes you believe that she is the program who is. Whether real star dancers are so serious, demanding and socially brutal, I don't know, but this is a television program.
Cheyenne (Lou de lage) is the Étoile in the center of the exchange between dance companies.
(Philippe Antonello / Prime)
“Étoile” does not have been in the plot for much time, in the sense that it is directed towards an obvious and definable objective: it has streams of the plot, rather, involving different characters in different situations and environments, solving problems that have nothing necessarily to do with the great idea of the series, as the show advances towards its irresolution of the first season. (The new plots collide near the end, which makes a second season a fact).
In a series of eight episodes, such cantracks can hardly be avoided, but it is a show in any more pleasant case in its details and performances than in the destination of the companies or the future of dance. These plots, subtramas and miniplists that involve dancers and assistants, technicians and politicians, are not equally gratifying, the best of all is the relationship between Mishi and the intimidating mother of Cheyenne, Bruna (Marie Berto), who hammer about things and with which Mishi finds himself housed, but together they create an attractive tapestry.
Kirby, whom I noticed for the first time in the great Canadian series “Slings & Arrows”, a comedy behind the stage with Shakespeare themes, not very different from “Étoile”, and who played Lenny Bruce convincing in “Maisel”, shoots between nerve energy and being a nervous disaster like Jack; Your flying up and down the stairs is a reason here. Gainsbourg, in Ninja Ninja Black simply accessorized, is the image of a woman who knows and means businesses.
David Haig affirms a good part of the program's comedy lines as the closest friend of Jack, Nicholas Leutwylek, a former choreographer and dancer who now moves in an electric scooter, although he remembers the good old cocaine and quaaludes times and when, as an invited artist in Stuttgart, Alemanes, “I gave me so many petologists, it is technically a great season.” (Sleep aid seems to be the drug of choice for young people and older here).
Kelly Bishop, from “Gilmore” and “Bunheads”, plays Jack's mother. David Byrne makes a fun appearance as David Byrne; The choreographer Mark Morris and, without a doubt, other real world figures could not identify the authenticity of Lend. The dancers are good, naturally, even if the dances can sometimes feel less exciting than we are destined to find them. More interesting is the placement of bodies in space when no one dances, lending a choreographic energy to ordinary conversations.
Those Wiseman films are broadcast on Kanopy, by the way, accessible to anyone with a library card (they are free and you should have one). They will lead you directly to that rarefied world, without extra comedy but with a lot of inherent drama. I can't recommend them enough.
