Polina

The creative process is always an elusive thing for filmmakers to capture, but amid all the startling visuals and the splendid acting, Polina rises, gloriously, to the challenge.

Polina is spare in dialogue; more is conveyed through painterly wide-screen cinematography by Georges Lechaptois.

The most important thing Polina does—and it is testament, again, to the involvement of Preljocaj, a man who has devoted his life to dance—is that it shows that the everyday life of an artist is not made up of catharsis and accomplishment, triumphs and breakthroughs. Those moments only come after years of hard work, of failing and trying again.

If this film’s directors, Valérie Müller and the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, don’t offer much overt material on Polina’s inner life, it’s because they don’t have to: the point of Polina, and this movie, is that her dancing is her being.

Images planted early in the film betray the path Polina will take; when we watch her move freely in the woods and commune with a moose, we guess that ballet may not be the last stop on her professional train.

The movie often seems on the verge of being interesting but repeatedly retreats into a formless vapidity.

Despite the panache with which the dance sequences are presented, it is frustratingly inert dramatically.