Many people consider Isadora Duncan to have had the same relationship to modern dance that Picasso had to modern painting. She rejected the stuffy, highly conventional constraints of classical ballet and defined expressive dance in her own image.  This film is a biopic of that eccentric free spirit, following a structure somewhat similar to the well-known Chaplin biopic with Robert Downey, Jr, using a framing device in which an aging Isadora dictates her autobiography to her amanuensis. This structure sets the stage for a series of flashbacks to the key incidents in her life. (The book they are writing together, Isadora Duncan's "Ma Vie," is a real book. See the Amazon links below)

The film hits all the high points ...

Duncan not only flouted traditional concepts in dance, but she flouted traditional concepts of morality as well. One of her lovers was the theatre designer, Gordon Craig; another was Paris Singer (heir to a sewing machine fortune), who gave her lavish gifts, including her own dancing school; she bore a child by each of those men. Both children were tragically drowned in an accident on the Seine River in 1913.

Isadora spent a considerable time in Russia in the period just after the revolution. That country embraced her as a fellow revolutionary, and gave her an old palace to use as a dancing school. Although Isadora had sworn never to marry, she finally broke down in 1922 and wed a handsome, drunken, insane Russian poet named Sergei Yesenin, who was 17 years younger than she, and was known to be a serial seducer. Although he would meet the Reaper at age 30, he managed to marry five or six times and fathered children by at least one other woman. He must have done at great job at seducing Duncan as well, because they had no common language, unless you count sex. According to her biographers, she knew no more than a dozen words of Russian, and he spoke no English at all. At one point Yesenin accompanied Isadora on tour but his frequent destructive rages, similar to the hotel room rampages of today's rock stars, caused them both much negative publicity. Of course, those violent incidents were probably more acceptable in the United States than their pro-Marxist politics. In Isadora's last U.S. tour in 1922-23, she managed to combine "immorality" and Communism in a stage performance in Boston, by waving a red scarf and baring her breast, proclaiming, "This is red! So am I!" The following year, Yesenin left Duncan and returned to Moscow where he was institutionalized for mental illness, and eventually committed suicide as soon as he was released.

Duncan's own life ended no less tragically than those of her children or her crazy poet. She always wore scarves which trailed behind her, and this caused her death in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of her friend's Bugatti automobile. As the driver sped off, the long cloth wrapped around the vehicle's axle. Ms. Duncan was yanked violently from the car and dragged for several yards before the driver realized what had happened. She died almost instantly from a broken neck.

She died a Soviet citizen.

The unconventional socialist actress Vanessa Redgrave, eventually a six-time Oscar nominee, was a perfect choice to evoke the unconventional socialist dancer, and she was rewarded for her memorable performance with Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, as well as the Best Actress award at Cannes. Unfortunately, the writer and director were unable to use that performance as a springboard to a great film. They made all the usual biopic mistakes. The story is too long and rambling and pointless, and tries to pack her entire life into its running time instead of focusing on some important thread or some key portion of her life. We sit back and watch Isadora trot around the globe, apparently abandoning in succession each of the projects she had been so passionately extolling the virtues of in the previous scene.

The film could have compensated for its unfocused script with some great musical numbers, but the dancing scenes are mostly repetitive. If you watch this film without knowing anything about Duncan's contribution to dance (which places you in the boat with me), you will conclude that Duncan's entire schtick consisted of prancing about like a twelve year old dreaming of being a dancer, wearing flowing gowns, trailing a diaphanous scarf, bending her knees, pointing her toes, waving her arms, and acting "free". I'm sure that must have been some of what Duncan did, but surely not the whole shebang! I guess I could have handled watching this once, but the process of prancing around the room must have occupied close to an hour of the film's running time, and it looked exactly the same every time. (One of her lovers actually said "will you stop prancing around the goddamned room" just as I was thinking the same thing!) I did, however, enjoy the prancing a lot more on the one occasion when she did it naked.

Although the film doesn't cohere very well, there are some great individual scenes. I liked some of the Russian material quite a bit. The one dance scene that is significantly different from the others is Duncan's first performance in Russia. The lights go out while she is performing, and the night seems doomed to failure, but everyone there improvises, including the audience, and the participants end up having the most memorable night of their lives. Someone in the Russian audience provides a lantern, then the audience members gradually start to sing to provide musical accompaniment. One man manages to produce a squeezebox. (Russians always carry one, don't you know? Astoundingly, in a presumed violation of the Soviet constitution, or at least in violation of the rule of Russian screen clichés, nobody there had a balalaika.) Several men join Duncan on stage for traditional Russian dancing. The film managed to capture the whirlwind of that moment. This scene got me. I was clapping along, completely drawn in.

Unfortunately, it takes the film nearly two hours to get to that point. That wait could be excruciatingly boring at times, and I got the impression that Ms Duncan was both pretentious and mentally ill. If the rest of the film had been as invigorating as the Russian part, I might have enjoyed spending all those minutes with the eccentric characters and their repetitive behaviors, but it wasn't and I didn't.

Note: my comments refer to a 153-minute version. The Region 2 PAL DVD version is 134 minutes long, which equates to 140 minutes of real running time because of the PAL speed-up. The original film is said to have been 188 minutes long. To my knowledge that version has never been made available, and I have never seen the longer cut, the virtues of which are extolled by many at IMDb who claim to have seen it.

 

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As Isadora, Vanessa Redgrave was stark naked in a private moonlit dance, and topless in a shocking public stage performance. This .zip file includes both 1024x576 versions and 1920x1080 versions of those two scenes.