White Nights

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers. 

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White Nights - Movie 1985 USA 136 Mins               

Great Dance Movie/ Good Cold War Era Drama

Nikolai Rodchenko, a Soviet ballet dancer who defected to the West, is on a plane that crashes while flying over Russian airspace and finds himself back behind the Iron Curtain. There he is placed with US defector, an African American tap dancer, who is supposed to encourage him to “think pink” again.

Dance is not really my thing but this movie is exceptional for several reasons. From the very opening dance scene, Mikhail Baryshnikov inhabits every muscle, fibre and cell of his body like no one else. And, unlike some dancers, Baryshnikov can act.
In his dance scenes the late Greg Hines shows us what real tap is – it is so not Shirley Temple making us vomit – real tap is percussion and about how to inhabit every muscle, fibre and cell of your body with rhythm. Plus, of course, Greg can actually sing and act.

It’s also interesting to see these two extremely fit men on screen together performing the same steps and see the total contrast between their two styles – we live in a world overly obsessed with perfection and uniformity and where everything is edited sometimes into shots no more than a few seconds long before a cut, so it’s refreshing to see difference as equally perfect rather than as a problem.

Next, the movie is interesting because it introduces Isabella Rossellini to the world. I’m not quite sure why she is in the story at all unless it’s because 1985 audiences needed reassurance that male dancers are not all horses hoofs, or her job is simply to be on-screen looking genetically impossible – Goldman’s script is not really good at fleshing out the important bits of a character’s character and Rossellini doesn’t stack up terribly well as an actress  in some scenes. It also features a youngish Helen Mirren in what is not a challenging role but at least a) she can act and b) she gets a chance to be Russian.

After more than 30 years I still wonder whether the Raymond Greenwood character played by Greg Hines was loosely based on the story of Paul Robeson. In fact, I wonder just how many Black Americans did defect to the Soviet Union? I know there was something of a stampede to France (James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone and others) but the Soviet Union just doesn’t seem that attractive. Which is sort of a digression, I know, but kind of follows from what a poor job James Goldman did of explaining just why the Raymond character defected to the Soviet Union.

Okay, why would any Black American in their right mind think the U.S. was a great place to be a Black American? we might ask. Especially up til the end of say, the Vietnam War. But then, I might also be tempted to ask just what it is that makes anyone buy the whole Nationalism scam anyway? Sure, joining the army is a smart career move – especially in a country where education is expensive and health care non-existent, but I don’t understand how it is okay to take an oath saying you agree to abandon your conscience and do what someone else says without question, no matter what. I just don’t. Especially if your own country is not being invaded.

I’m no Quaker, so I have no in principle problem with killing if there is a perfectly sound reason, but I have to say Australia is a shite example of a democracy and we have had some fair knobs with absolute power over our own military who could be replaced any time by a simple party-room coup, so if I was ever of an age to be conscripted I would like to think retrospectively I probably would have been a conscientious objector. I know I was old enough to be decidedly against the Vietnam War, but the wrong gender to be at risk.

But getting back to the movie… when Raymond tells his story about joining the army and then flipping to the soviets it just sounds pretty thin compared to the Paul Robeson story which, in the context of Robeson's era actually makes sense.

Awesome dance scene

Another aspect of this movie I found interesting is the brief comparison Goldman makes between life in the old Soviet Union and life in the U.S. and the question of whether one might offer more freedom than the other, and why.

This movie was released in 1985, not long before the Hungarians started letting people escape through the barbed wire fence, which sort of marked the beginning of the end of the USSR. But the world Raymond moved in and the world described by White Nights was still a command economy – it wasn’t totally “efficient” but everyone had a job. There are plenty of people in the U.S. today – which has an “efficient” demand economy – who would kill for a job in a mine like the one Chaiko shows Raymond in Siberia, even if it only gave them a basic wage and a sense of self-worth.

 

(Joan Robinson quite famously said “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” She not-so-famously died just before this movie was released, and long, long before Naomi Klein publicised the problem of global sweatshops where people can start out with a little misery and over time fall into deeper and deeper debt/misery – the sort of thing that would have had Joan spinning in her grave. Nothing to do with the movie but totally relevant to any comparison of command/ demand economies and BS about personal responsibility/ freedom.)
Who, me? A Marxist? WTF would that even mean?

But mostly this is just a movie about dance and regret and risk and hope, not a movie about politics, and it’s not a bad movie for passing some time with some impressive moments.