When you see the spectacular and rather breathtaking dancing scenes in this movie you can understand why writer/director Stéphanie Di Giusto chose to make her very first feature film very loosely based on Loie Fuller the great French/American dancer of the Belle Époque period. However Di Gusto takes great liberties with telling the dancer’s story and one assumes it was to make it more vital and interesting, but sadly this rather confusing biopic just ends up a tad too pedestrian when the focus drifts away from Fuller’s stage performances.
In the movie a teenage Fuller (the musician Soko) moves back in with her mother (Amanda Plummer) in a Temperance Hall once her French gold-prospector father is killed in the Wild West. Desperate to be an actress she persuades a theatre owner to let her perform a dance in the intermission of his play, but gets very annoyed when she is not taking seriously. She does however attract the attention of a destitute but very suave French Count (Gaspard Ulliel) who is married to an American Heiress, and who in between being high on ether tries to bed her even though he has trouble actual getting erect.
After learning that in France she would be taken seriously, she steals enough money from the Count for a passage on an ship bound for Europe and ends up on the doorstep of the Follies Bergere begging for a job. The Director M. Marchand (François Damiens) is not impressed at all, but Gabrielle his assistant (Mélanie Thierry) is and we suspect that it’s not just with Loie’s talent for dancing. With Gabrielle’s help she gets a chance to mount an elaborate expensively lit set and after her sensational debut twirling around the stage so energetically, she is overnight the toast of tout Paris, albeit on the first steps of ensuring her body is racked with pain for the rest of her lives.
The newly divorced Count appears back in Paris and so Loie moves into his vast empty chateau to use some of her new gained wealth to pay off his debts, and also a means to start creating whole company of young girls as her supporting dancers. It is all going swimmingly well and Loie even gets the offer to fulfill a ling standing ambition when she is asked to perform at the Paris Opera House. Then one day a new American girl turns up at the Chateau as a replacement dancer and in a flash starts to unnerve Loie completely.
The new addition to the Company is an unknown Isadora Duncan (Lily Rose-Depp) and it is very clear that she will never be content with just being part of the chorus and will do anything to manipulate her way into becoming a star herself. She learns that she can soon have most people wrapped around her finger, including a besotted Loie even though when she makes a pass at the young girl, she is totally rejected. It is inevitable that it is going to end badly for one of them, or both.
Soko seems a little lost as she struggled with being the central focus of this melodrama in a role which never really gives full credit to exactly what this legendary pioneer of both modern dancer and theatrical lighting really achieved. Depp is very effective in her first serious movie acting role although poor editing made it clear that it wasn’t her that was doing most of the actual dancing. It’s really then left to the two talented French actors Thierry and Ulliel to add some depth to the whole piece.
A strange footnote is that one of the awards the movie was surprisingly nominated for at Cannes Film Festival when it was released last May was for the Queer Palm, which is given to the best LGBT movie, a category it very barely qualifies for.
Labels: 2017, biopic, drama, French, Loie Fuller
