Ballet is more than beauty ...

After reading Toni Bentley’s well-written article about Robert Altman’s film “The Company” (“A Picture of Passion,” Jan. 1), I was expecting to see something cheesy, like “Flashdance.” Instead I saw a film that succeeds wherever Bentley said it fails. A second reading of her article revealed her to be merely promoting her own view of ballet as a Balanchine-only world.

In a Balanchine world, all the ballerinas are of a certain height and build. Thankfully, the Joffrey Ballet never succumbed to that narrow view of the universe. By the way, nothing of Balanchine appears in the film even though Bentley makes him the starting point of her article. It’s not about Balanchine; it’s about the Joffrey, the artistic director of which is Gerald Arpino.

Malcolm McDowell did not play Mr. A as “flamboyant, coarse and self-important.” Yes, we see him checking his scarf in the mirror and being quite preoccupied when it suits him, but by presenting him as a full human being, with faults but also with an overriding commitment to the company, we get a more realistic and certainly more interesting view of the man.

How does Bentley know that the members of the company have “dull” lives? The film certainly wasn’t about their lives, but what it did show of them didn’t appear to be dull. Is showing the company members “worry[ing] about their contracts, their injuries, their age ... love lives ... [and] paychecks” really a demotion? Dedication to an art form is not the only “reality” of a dancer’s life.

Bentley criticizes the film for giving us only four minutes of beautiful dancing. I found much more beautiful dancing than that, with gorgeously shot performances from several ballets. The irony is that Altman succeeds in showing us the sheer beauty of ballet in this “democratic” and not “aristocratic” film. Even though ballets and films do not portray a world of beauty alone, the beauty survives, along with the merely human.

Rick Friesen

Lake Balboa