On Saturday, Laura and I saw the film Ballets Russses.
It was not our first choice; we had ended up at the Shattuck Cinemas
mistakenly looking for another movie. I was so pleased to see Ballets Russes.
I expected to like movie but did not come prepared to be moved to
tears. It turns out that I'm not the only one who was moved by the
film. Joining many other critics, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it
"a moving, invigorating elegy to the civilization that sustained it." I
had the feeling that because the movie tapped into a lot of my
particular interests and current "issues," I found Ballets Russes
to be even more affecting than a typical viewer dialing into the
universal themes of the fragility and timelessness of beauty, the
redemption of suffering, the folly of power struggles and giant egos,
the tradeoffs between age and youth, the desire to make art (and all
that other stuff.)
On a more prosaic front, I've noticed that the Wikipedia article on the Ballets Russes does not mention the movie -- and that there is no article on the movie so far. Time to correct these deficiencies?
