3D Giselle – review

3D is suddenly everywhere, shiny new toys for filming dance. In Pina, Wim Wenders imminent documentary film on the work of Pina Bausch, justifies the technology even in spades. Not only ramp angle up physical intensity of movement, it works on alchemical influence our emotional reaction.

Giselle 3Dmarketing year: 2010country: the rest of the worldRuntime: 96 minutesDirectors: Valery GergievCast: Leonid Sarafanov, Natalia Osipovamore in this movie

The new 3D version of the Mariinsky Giselle, on the other hand, are so disconcertingly wonky, it makes your eyes hurts. The technology seems as though it is hardly tested; drastic changes of focus abort, and there are frequent moments when the dancers displayed cut and pasted to the screen from a completely different performance (often the ballet Corps front displayed a shorter than those behind the whole foot).

And yet, and yet: when technology works, it gives us a glimpse of how extraordinary a 3D Giselle may. Act two is the most powerful: with homemade closeups of Wilis criss-crossing the stage in a flash of white skirts and moonlight; a stab pure deadly terror when they line up to bar Albrechts exit, and we see a diagonal ghostly aggressive women extends to infinity, in front and behind.

Hyperrealism of 3D closeup can be amazing: take us almost inside scissor-sharp brilliance Leonid Sarafonov batterie and exquisite, deadly switch of Ekaterina Kondaurova arabesque. Best of all is the intimate access it gives us to Natalia Osipova performance in the title role. She gave a five-star Giselle in London last summer, and the movie in its height retrieves live emotion floods her blunt a little face and the many, many small miracles in her dance. Her alone on the glasses and go.

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