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. 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.
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?
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.
