May 11–18, 2000

movie shorts

Center Stage

Young ballet dancers hit the Big Apple, struggle with the trials and joys of a fiercely competitive ballet academy and dance, dance, dance their youthful hearts out. It’s all here: the stuck-up bitch (but is she really?), the stage mom, the city girl with ’tude (but what lurks behind that sassy front?), the sweetly sardonic black queen, the lascivious choreographer, the obligatory bulimia plot. There’s enough formula here to power a whole maternity ward, and it would be easy to dismiss this twenty-first century Fame and be done with it. The filmmakers — director Nicholas Hytner, of The Madness of King George, and screenwriter Carol Heikkinen — seem determined not to overwhelm their audience with, well, ballet, so they make sure to give us a salsa scene, a modern jazz scene (verging on aerobics), and, as a closing number, a supposedly avant-garde production (far from it) set to hackneyed pop ballads and Michael Jackson. Still, we do get small doses of the real thing, some fine dancing, and a mostly likeable cast including Peter Gallagher, the dancer Ethan Stiefel, and as the academy students a decent bunch of dancer-actors among whom Zoë Saldana (Eva) stands out. While the school-of-WB dialogue is occasionally stilted, most of the dancers acquit themselves at least as well as the non-dancer Eion Bailey, playing a Columbia student — though that means setting the bar rather low.

—Stuart Semmel