“The Dancer” (“La Danseuse”), French writer-director Stèphanie Di Giusto’s feature debuet, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. It did not win any Palmarès, and rightly so. Drawing from the Belle Epoque and the life of American modern dancer Loïe Fuller, Di Giusto’s biopic straddles fact and fiction, but winds up dismissing the spirit of the era and of the dancers it portrays in the process, attempting to bring light to someone who, so she assumes, has been forgotten. The film credits a free adaptation of Giovanni Lista’s 1994 novel “Loïe Fuller, danseuse de la Belle Epoque,” with a script co-written by Sarah Thibau and Di Giusto in collaboration with Thomas Bidegain.Originated by Kate Vaughan in London in 1873, the skirt dance became common in the 1880s among society ladies to perform as entertainment. Fuller’s take was to amplify the skirt dance and augment it with technology: using 350 meters of silk, she sewed rods inside her sleeves and added gas-lit projections that, whilst swirling, transfigured kaleidoscopically like the froth of the sea, blossoms, or a serpent. Fuller pioneered multimedia performance and invented new scenographic methods by mixing chemicals for gels and slides and using luminescent salts to create lighting effects. She was also one of the first female filmmakers, the embodiment of Art Nouveau, and a muse to artists from Rodin to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In Paris, the iconic posters depicting Fuller by Jules Cherét are still everywhere, reproduced in a variety of souvenirs. There have been scholars and imitators over the years examining, preserving, and extending her legacy — she has never been forgotten.But the film rewrites her narrative, opening with Fuller’s upbringing as a Midwestern farm girl, reciting Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” to a French father who was, in actuality, as American as apple pie. “The Dancer” then follows Fuller (played by the actress Soko) as she moves to New York seeking a career as an actress before becoming a dancer, then to Paris to secure copyright for her patents. At Folies Bergère, she meets Gabrielle Bloch (Mélanie Thierry, in a standout performance) — lady-in-waiting and lover — who remains loyal in supporting her practice. It is in Paris that Fuller earns her reputation with the “Serpentine Dance” and establishes a dance school in a mansion offered by the terminally ill Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), a member of the French aristocracy. Fuller was openly lesbian, living with her mother and her companion, Gabrielle, until her death. But having fictional character Louis jumpstart Fuller’s career, characterizing her as his patron, outrageously besmirches her iconic status as, among other things, a feminist. His support only manages to denigrate her.After an encounter with American modern dancer Isadora Duncan (Lily-Rose Depp), Fuller stops performing, and “The Dancer” places an emphasis on the obvious contrast between the two: Fuller is masculine, modernist, and athletic, tiptoeing around the boundaries of physical limits, whereas Duncan’s overtly feminine form and effortlessly bare performance ignites a rivalry resulting in Fuller’s relegation to the passé.Soko trained for six hours a day over the course of a month with Fuller imitator, Jody Sperling, in order to restage her performances. Featured in the film are her solos “Quack MD” (1891), in which she performed under hypnosis, the legendary “Serpentine Dance” (1891), and “Dance du Mirroir” (1897). With a background in advertising and fashion films, Di Giusto’s key dance sequences are more like pop-video clips, cutting the dance into fragmentary gestures mismatched to Max Richter’s recomposed recordings of Vivaldi, rather than reimagining the dazzling performances Fuller actually staged, aiming but failing to conjure climactic suspense.We see model-turned-actor Depp gracefully posing as she would for a photo shoot, or extending her arms to her sides — moving them à la Duncan — for a shot from her waist up. But Depp’s inability to dance required a double, whose name Di Giusto strangely refused to credit during interviews.It recalls the scandalous obfuscation wafted by the production team of “Black Swan” (2011), who deceived the press into believing Natalie Portman had danced 90% of what we saw on screen when in fact her double, Sarah Lane, would have something to say to the contrary. Depp’s dance double, Fanny Sage, former student of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon, gave her own interpretation of Duncan in an awfully edited scene that, pointlessly, accelerated her movements as if to declare that historical technique was in need of aesthetic contemporizing for a presumably clued-up audience. It’s clear that Depp’s involvement was a crass, opportune bit of casting, marketing a famous name for a teenage demographic.Vanessa Redgrave, starring as Duncan in Karel Reisz’s biopic “Isadora” (1968), required no double, and she is splendid as much in her acting as is in her dancing, which thrusts out from her solar plexus. That film captured the period and spirit of the dancer in her glory, and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969. If Di Giusto’s intention was to reanimate Loïe Fuller’s legacy in similar fashion, then “The Dancer,” quite to the contrary, serves only to relegate Fuller to the domain of abject obscurity.
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