A woman in a sparkly white gown enters a train and begins stomping on a giant pillow, while a man with giant cardboard Spock ears looks on from the back seat. It’s all my worst public transportation experiences transformed into a huge joke.
But there’s more: some odd, old-time pop music is playing the background, anding a funky vintage sweetness. Did I mention that the train was the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the bizarre century-old Floating Tram?
Welcome to Pina.
The ride on the tram was my favorite moment of Wim Wenders' 3D Pina Bausch movie. And there were plenty of other moments of rapture, too. I’m still digesting the image of a woman shoveling dirt onto another woman while Mahler rumbles in the background. And humor—how can you not love a woman in the flowery gown skipping through a pretty forest with a leaf blower?
But much of the time I was wondering what in the world Wenders thought he was doing. The movie has a nice, thoughtful, low-key intensity that’s appealing. But it’s not really earned.
While most of the dances staged out in the world are cleverly done, Wenders never figures out an adequate way to present the dances presented inside a theater. He tries different tricks: the camera sits behind the heads of a live audience, the camera chases the dancers around onstage, the camera zooms up dancers nostrils, the camera freezes in place while everyone runs around it, etc.
For one thing, it doesn’t respect Bausch’s stage pictures—which are 99% of her work. And it only intermittently takes advantage of the 3D effect.
Bob Fosse, a kindred spirit, might have been the right director to film Bausch.
The exception, thankfully, was the extended presention of bits from Kontakthof, in which three sets of dancers—the regular troupe, a group of seniors, and a group of teens—enact Bausch’s hilarious/frightening homage to social dancing. A lot of the time Bausch’s performance art/dance/theater/whatever is more arty than art, but this piece is acute, earnest and perfectly poised.
The movie includes remarks from the dancers. I wish we could have been spared their expressions of adulation for their late boss. If I heard one more dancer share a bit of gnomic advice that Pina once gave them, I was going to puke.
Bausch was lucky. Besides an international assortment of cute guys (Michael Strecker, Reiner Behr, Franko Schmidt, Pablo Aran Gimeno, Jorge Puerta Armenta), there are beautiful, stately older women like Josephine Ann Endicott and the born-for-the-stage Nazareth Panadero. It was great to see them dance.
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