Isadora

Isadora Duncan achieved fame in the heady first two decades of the 20th century, the same period that gave us Theosophy, the beginnings of abstract art, 'The Rite of Spring' and the Russian Revolution. A champion of free expression in art and life and a lifelong opponent of bourgeois convention, she was latterly claimed by 1960s counter-culturalists as an icon. Whilst she could be considered the mother of interpretive dance, how talented she was herself is another matter.  Although dotingly uncritical, Karel Reisz’s biopic gives one no reason to believe that she was gifted with much more than a talent for self-promotion.

Starting with her first bawdy forays in the music halls of her birthplace, America, shuttling back and forth between its present, the last year of Duncan’s life, and the past, the film diligently charts the main events of her life that ended with a freak accident when the scarf she was wearing (and which was given to her by the woman who was Preston Sturges’s mother) got tangled in the wheels of the roadster in which she was a passenger and snapped her neck.

Although a lavish film with excellent production design and rich cinematography Isadora suffers from the typically ‘60s tendency to think that the exotic and the eccentric in itself was a sufficient substitute for dramatic substance.  Most problematically of all, its core raison d’etre, Duncan’s dancing, is not particularly impressive, largely amounting to a lot of prancing and leaping about, something which might have looked like liberation in the days when women were strapped into whalebone corsets and balanced huge, feathered hats on their heads but now looks mostly amateurish (the most effectively staged scene in this respect is a “Revolutionary” dance which Duncan performed to a scandalized audience on her return to America from Soviet Russia).

Vanessa Redgrave in an Oscar-nominated role gives a fully-committed performance but this mainly amounts to making Duncan a larger-than-life character. Unfortunately, particularly in the scenes of the dancer in her final year, Reisz contrives to make her look like a harridan with garish make-up and frizzy red hair, the result being borderline ugly. Most of the other performances are as equally forced or awkward although an oddly-cast Jason Robards is silky smooth as one of Duncan’s lovers.

Edited down from an original 168m print, Reisz’s film is still too long at 131m but that was in 1960s when provoking the bourgeoisie was considered a lot more inherently appealing than it is today.

 

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