NUREYEV: LEAPS OF FAITH

Rudi made me cry. 

I don't cry at or during films anymore, mostly because the varying levels of discomfort my eyes are usually in, make it hard for me to escape entirely into the visual world before me. But the life of Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev contained within a single powerful documentary, All The World His Stage, had me in tears for much of the second half.

Exile is a common enough story for many of us. Voluntary or involuntary. But in Rudi's case he was a pawn of a nation, a government, an ideology that his body and will refused to succumb to. Of course, his defection in Paris in 1961 had nasty consequences for his friends, the 'kitchen culture' crowd, who had, in secrecy, danced and recited poetry and played under the wrap of darkness. But they separated him from his mother, and more than anyone else in his family, I think that may have been the worst of it, though in the end they let him back for the days before her death. They say that although she was failing to recognise anyone else, she knew he had been to see her, but what was that one moment against all the years - the millions of yearnings, and achings for home?

And then there was Dame Margot - La Fonteyn - the substitute mother figure? No, she was more, she was everything to him;  after she died, he had no one; he would call friends before dawn, and say nothing, only cry. She was on the verge of asking her husband Tito for a divorce, and then he got shot, and Fonteyn's mother said how will it look if you don't go immediately to his side? How will it look? Even the greatest prima donna ballerina obeys when her mother says those four sinister words. That was the end of Nureyev and Fonteyn, so said the documentary, although in reality they danced for years afterwards, and stayed close until her death. 

The violinist Yehudi Menuhin called Nureyev a panther. Parkinson asked him to describe how things had been in Russia when Nureyev was a child. 'Bad,' replied the dancer. 'But how bad?' pressed Parky. Because people always want to know how bad, from the safety and comfort of their own lives. Richard Avedon photographed Nureyev's leaps into air as though he were challenging gravity to call him merely human, but Bob Dylan wrote 'No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.'  

The documentary was at once the embodiment of freedom and simultaneously a chaining down, a weighing down of things that are bigger than us, wider than we can control. Politics, AIDS. Being called Russian when you are really Tatar, but no one knows of Tatars or their complicated history with Russia...

 Ah... go watch the documentary if you can. Also Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two. Also M.I.A, about the Sri Lankan Tamil English singer and activist Mathangi 'Maya' Arulpragasam. Also, the manager of the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse has promised me the Nureyev poster when the film has finished running... these are moments worth living for.  

THE MYSTERY OF MAUDIE

Most of my friends know by now that I am the sort of movie watcher who almost attends a film school of her own, so dedicated am I to catching films at the Arts Picturehouse Cinema in Cambridge. It is a cosy little three screen cineplex, each screen snuggled up to the next, and all tucked into the smallest edge of a building. I visit it as you would a library - while returning one lot of books, your eyes spy a new possibility. In my case, Maudie, directed by Irish director Aisling Walsh. 

The tender biopic reveals the unamorous coupling of Maud Lewis, the Nova Scotia painter and her fish smuggling peasant Everett Lewis. Maud's life would move anyone to tears - born with juvenile arthritis that eventually crippled her, she was also betrayed by dishonourable members of her family who sold her precious newborn for money, telling Maud that her baby had been born deformed like her mother and buried immediately.

Years later Maud learns the truth. Everett takes her to see her baby, now a grown woman, happy, tending to roses outside the white and blue shutters of her home. Maud cowers in the shadow of her husband's truck, broken and healed, simultaneously.

The shadows of Maud's life are painted over by her extraordinary capacity for wielding joy into simple brushwork. Deceptively simple. Her work began to sell, began to be loved - passers by to her tiny, wildly decorated house, were enchanted. She was commissioned by the likes of Richard Nixon, then President of the United States. 

In my own little cabin in the garden, I have been wielding my brushes and paint. Every dark or gloomy corner now has a fresh white or blue coat, reassuring my eyes of light. The past week has been a complex one to navigate - I had a slender catheter surgically inserted into my vein, one end hanging outside for me to self administer liquid antibiotics, and the other end resting atop my heart. Self administration makes me respect my nurses even more than usual - so many little details to concentrate on; air bubbles and contamination to be careful of. Twenty eight injected infusions done, two to go. Unless the doctors decide otherwise.

By the end of her life, Maud was crippled with arthritis, unable to walk, but still able to hook her brush into the curled claw of her hand, and do the thing that made her utterly content with her life. Paint pictures. The whole world framed in a tiny square of happiness. To be an artist is to know suffering, but to know beauty and joy more. 

MOONLIGHT (a review)

In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue. This was the original title for Barry Jenkins' Oscar winning film 'Moonlight'. The film was based on an unpublished, semi-autobiographical play written by Tarell Alvin McCraney. I missed it during the pre-Oscars season buzz, so when I saw it playing for one day only on a random June afternoon, I jumped out of my lethargic skin and dove into the empty cinema. After the film had started I was joined by a group of three strangers, but I pretended it was just me and Chiron. And some popcorn. (It wasn't a popcorn eating type of film, but hey, where else am I gonna eat popcorn?).

Moonlight is a triptych. A piece of art. The sound of the sea begins the film, and a seaside palette of Provence blue and daffodil yellow bathes our eyes at unexpected moments, so you begin to float, suspending fear, anxiety, prejudice. You are 'Little' Chiron, held loosely but safely in the hands of Juan. Mehershala Ali won that Oscar because even though his character mysteriously disappears a third into the film, you feel his ghostly presence throughout. Weaving in and out on classical strings, Cuban and hip hop beats. 

But at the same time that sudden absence also made me tighten up, and I couldn't relax into the lyrical beauty. I wouldn't let myself cry until the film had ended, the credits were rolling and I realised Barry Jenkins had kept us safe throughout. I don't think I've ever talked to a film director in my head before, but I was willing Jenkins not to let me, us, fall through all the cracks we already know exist for Chiron and his kind of invisible blue blackness.

'Moonlight' is as serious as it gets and as loving. The two faces of woman in the film aren't polarised through moral judgement. They are just being themselves - human, fallible, trying. Failing, losing, surviving. Loving. Speaking of love, I think I'll watch anything with Janelle Monae - she has such a fierce, feisty, authentic presence here as in 'Hidden Figures'. And Naomie Harris - from Bond woman to crack addict - a powerhouse performance.

There is a moment at the beginning of the film when little Chiron looks up at Juan - a side along gaze that asks with big eyes, 'Who are you?' Why should I trust you, say those eyes. When Chiron's mother meets Juan for the first time, she looks at him, eyes heavy with suspicion. 'And who is you?' Juan replies: 'I'm nobody'. And finally, towards the end, the second love of Chiron's life, Kevin, asks the same question: 'Who is you?' And with that question, there is a chance for Chiron to not answer: 'I'm nobody'. He is being offered a chance to be somebody. To someone. 

'Who is you?' is the heartbeat of the film, echoed, mirrored. We grow up and into ourselves, and some of us get to be loved by people who ask that question of us, who listen for the answer. Who wait for the answer. Even when it changes.