Mao's last dancer

Has anyone ever made a movie about nasty ballet people? Maybe the art form doesn't have any. [So Black Swan is awaited with delight.]

Some balletomanes are less sweet than others, naturally, and Mao's Last Dancer shows a few cultured folks with momentary sour edges. Not enough, of course, to mar the movie's overall sense of sugar-plumminess.

Once upon a ballet time, as so often in movies, a talented young dancer from a totalitarian regime seeks freedom to be himself in a land of the free. This time it's the tale of Li Cunxin, whose autobiography sported the same marketing-savvy title.

A Beijing Dance Academy graduate, he was invited to become an exchange student with the Houston Ballet for three months in the 1980s. He fell in timely love with (and married for six years) a physically-challenged dancer, becoming a diplomatic pawn when he was kidnapped by the local PRC consulate. Members of the Houston Ballet and its board had mixed feelings about thwarting Beijing's wishes, but an immigration lawyer had been called in. A deal was struck (okayed by Deng Xiaoping himself, the screenplay notes). The dancer could stay in the USA, lose his PRC citizenship and never return to China.

He does return, of course, and during the movie he flashbacks a lot to his childhood home in Shandong. "After enough time", the PRC lets his parents visit him and then allows him to return to his home village so that he can dance in the main village yard with his second wife, an Australian ballerina, and an off-screen orchestra.

The movie is only bearable because of the availability of a real Chinese dancer, Chi Cao (from the UK's Birmingham Royal Ballet) to fill the lead role. In his screen-acting debut he proves he can act well, dance divinely, speak English with enchanting British accents, and flaunt a finely muscled body in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

The supporting cast has a tougher task presenting stereotypical characters in Houston. Bruce Greenwood is just about credible as a choreographer (real-life Ben Stevenson) with a discreetly gay air, but no one else really has a chance with the cliched screenplay.

The overall impact of this Australian biopic was soporific. Director Bruce Beresford cannot have been expected to find cinematic flourishes in rural Chinese sets, rehearsal rooms and consulate offices. Sadly, he couldn't create them either for theatrical performances in Sydney. They were as stagy as the film itself. Not surprisingly, the end-credits notes do not reveal that Li became an Australian stockbroker.