Critic Reviews

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.

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.

As Polina, Shevstova delivers a performance that feels wonderfully unforced, if that’s the right word, in a role that can only be called “driven.” There’s almost an emptiness about her character. Polina’s expression of self is all on the surface — at least initially.

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

The film conveys energy, color, and movement from start to finish, irrespective of whether Polina is dancing, bartending, or trying to catch a few moments of sleep in a laundromat.

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.

Shevtsova, until recently a dancer with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, doesn’t quite pierce the narrative’s two-dimensionality. Through Preljocaj’s ecstatic choreography, though, she goes deep, and Polina’s story finds its language and its pulse.

Polina is vivid as dance but vague as drama.

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.

Though the film suggests a hardiness borne of her working-class background and mobster father, Polina remains fairly opaque. At least the contemporary dance sequences are beautifully mounted; French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has a co-director credit on the film.