Berlin and Beyond Film Festival: Rhythm Is It.
The Castro is still the best place to watch a movie ever, especially since they let us brownbag our lunch for the 1pm showing of Rhythm Is It, during the Berlin and Beyond festival. Seating down, we realized we were way over the median age despite our youthful disposition. It looked like every school took the opportunity of the matinee to give a bit of fresh air to the kids, even our very own Lycée Français.
A picture of Rhythm Is It graces the cover of the program, so there is no escaping it: you'll see it's about kids dancing. It is a documentary which follows, amongst others, a group of students from an underprivileged high-school who got volunteered to participate in a world-class dance performance, with the Berlin Philharmonic playing Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps.
Those are not the only dancers in the performance, but they are involved thanks to Royston Maldoom, a British choreographer whose dance company's aim is to advance dance as a tool for personal development and social change. "You can change your life in a dance class," sez Royston. The documentary goes about showing that this aim is not some politically correct utopia, but actually works. Gloomy kids who listen to hip-hop will get to understand Stravinsky; and through dancing they will learn valuable life lesson of rigor and discipline and meeting challenges they thought beyond their reach (and cynics would add: teenagers willl learn to shut up when expressing themselves).
Maldoom and Berliner Philarmonic conductor Sir Simon Rattle reminisce about their own teenage experience, and all this is very uplifting, especially if you still deal with your teenage angst. You too can become a world reknown artist like them! We have more or less figured out what to do with our lives, and some of it involves listening to music, so we have to admit wishing the documentary had more music and less psychobabbling. The scenes we enjoyed the most were the ones with the orchestra rehearsing. If you ever wonder what a conductor does besides shaking his baton with the beat, this movie will enlighten you.
We also felt let down by the ending of the movie: Sacre du Printemps is a 30 minute ballet, so we were hoping that, once the protagonists struggles were delineated and then solved by the magic of dancing, we would get to see the whole performance. No such luck: it does end the movie, but we see only short excerpts shot in a spotty stroboscopic light. Performantus interruptus. And then Royston comes on stage to salute, and him, who was a spry dancer in the scenes before, is now using crutches. What happened? It's puny, but we could not help imagining he was beat up by mutinous kids backstage.
Our own Michael Tilson Thomas with the SF Symphony has a recording of Le Sacre du Printemps for those who want to change their life dancing to it in the comfort of their living room.