Australia,
2001, 92 min
Shown in 2002
CREDITS
- dir
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Paul Cox
- prod
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Paul Cox, Aanya Whitehead
- scr
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Paul Cox
- cam
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Paul Cox, Hans Sonneveld
- editor
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Paul Cox
- mus
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Paul Grabowsky
- cast
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Derek Jacobi, Chris Haywood, Vicki Attard, David McAllister, Csaba Buday, Michele Buday
- source
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416 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. FAX: 212-545-9931. EMAIL: sfedak@wellspring.com.
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COMMENTS
Paul Cox in person.
OTHER
In 1918 the famed Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky suffered a mental breakdown and recorded his struggles in his notebooks. Director Paul Cox, who earlier used Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo as source material for his exceptional Vincent, here brings the despair of another great artist to life. Nijinsky, like van Gogh, found a particular kind of communion with the world. We never see the artist, we only hear his words, read here with great sensitivity by Derek Jacobi. To accompany the words Cox uses visuals that are poetic, associative, interior and nonlinear. The range of imagery is heightened by the confessions that come from Nijinsky—and to supplement these sequences, Cox recreates scenes from some of the ballets, most famously a restaging of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Fawn. Still, Nijinksy reveals himself most forcefully through the words that flow like a stream from his pen. Necessarily kaleidoscopic and impressionistic, Cox’s technique allows him to avoid the pitfalls of the biographical portrait and create a much more profound, hesitant picture of his subject, a man who described himself as being “a man of motion, not immobility”—perhaps Cox’s own image of himself, but also a prescription for what the cinema should be.
—Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
