The dream revisited in stunning cinematic style

The Russian film The Bolshoi brings back the dreams of an aspiring dancer whose career was cut short by injury.

The gilt, cavernous magnificence of The Bolshoi Theatre.

For years after deciding not to return to the Australian Ballet School for the final year of the three-year course, I was haunted by the most vivid dreams: exhausting, ultra-realistic night-sweat visions where I’d be dancing with the Australian Ballet under a blaze of stage lights to thunderous applause, or going through the concatenation of barre exercises to a tinkling piano that comprise the daily ritual of class, or explaining to Maina Gielgud, then the company’s artistic director, that I’d changed my mind and wanted to return (in real life she had written me a letter, urging me to do just that)..

But time and its merciless, rapid march is the enemy of every dancer; each career is a flickering flame that is all too soon snuffed out, and for me, having been plagued by niggling but persistent injuries, the writing was on the dressing room wall. There was no going back.

Over time, the dreams — and the dream — faded and life moved on. I suppose it was the mind and body’s way of making sense of suddenly being cut off from something so all-consuming and immersive. For the world of dance demands total commitment, physically and mentally.

From time to time I would review the performances of other companies for various newspapers and magazines, and the pangs of regret would flare up and gnaw at me. But even that grew fainter with the passing of the years.

All the old feelings — and for a night or two, the dreams — came flooding back recently after attending the Sydney premiere of The Bolshoi, which was the opening event of the Russian Resurrection Film Festival.

The world of ballet rarely translates well to film. Dancers seldom make believable screen actors, and even the most versatile and talented actor struggles to convince as a ballet dancer. Natalie Portman came close in Daniel Aronofsky’s demented fugue of a film, Black Swan (an exaggeration of the insular, competitive and madness-inducing hothouse that is the average ballet company, although perhaps not as great an exaggeration as the uninitiated might think).

Mikhail Baryshnikov was an exception; one of the greatest male dancers to have graced the stage and also a compelling, Oscar-nominated presence on screen, in films like White Nights and The Turning Point, both featuring the Russian defector at the height of his powers (I watched my grainy videotaped copy of The Turning Point over and over until I literally wore the tape out).

Director Valery Todorovsky achieves the almost impossible in The Bolshoi, with his leading characters also real ballet dancers near the top of their games in both realms. It tells the story of Julia, a young girl doing hip-hop in the street and helping hooligans pick pockets, who is taken in by an ageing alcoholic ex-star of the Bolshoi Theatre. Recognising her raw talent, he leverages his old connections to finagle her a place at the Bolshoi’s elite school, and we are whisked along in an epic, oh-so-Russian tale of pain, poverty, betrayal, isolation, sacrifice and redemption, underscored by the merciless quick-step march of time, which begins slipping through a dancer’s fingers from the moment they pull on their first pair of tights.

Margarita Simonova, who was there in person to open the festival, is a revelation on screen as Julia, no less so Ekaterina Samuilina as her younger incarnation, Aleksandr Domogarov as the washed-up drunken star, Alisa Freyndlikh as the stern ballet mistress losing her memory and her marbles, Anna Isaeva as Julia’s friend and cat-eyed arch rival and Nicolas Le Riche as an ageing danseur and Lothario in the twilight of his career.

But perhaps the real star is the gilt, cavernous magnificence of The Bolshoi Theatre, a grand dame whose legend needed polishing after the tawdry revelations ofthe recent documentary Bolshoi Babylon, the real-life acid attack by a disgruntled dancer on its artistic director, and the comments of dancer Anastasia Volochkova, who described the Bolshoi as a “brothel for oligarchs” after she was sacked for being too fat in 2013.

Watching The Bolshoi in the presence of Rachel, my pas de deux partner from the school who, unlike me, went on to dance with the Australian Ballet, was a poignant experience and a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

For anyone who has an interest in ballet, or simply in stunningly original, beautifully conceived and masterfully executed cinema, it’s a film worth seeking out. It’s also a stark reminder that time, as the late great David Bowie sang, is waiting in the wings, and his script is you and me.

We should be on by now.