The body as art is not hinted, it's the piece. This indulgence in the sensual somehow does not invite perversion. The effect is it's wholly performance authorial, a complete integration of performer and role, which happens just once in a blue moon. She almost dies each time, like a birth effect, same time it brings a cinema of transcendence. And maybe the french would roll their eyes and say, can't believe he fell for our tricks. That she's bringing the effect of the bad girl. But it sees no difference between her, her dance, the cinema. The film could be science fiction, like she is some techno-bird, cranking the levers, the lights, the darkness she emerges under spotlight, her dance like a ritual for the space gods; it's all very steampunk, but where here the era of industrialism begins for great mechanizations to streamline and integrate, so too would be art by the same process, to the same ends but in the way of the ecstatic truth. I'm envious because who ever gets so actualized? You have talents and presences and great ones but rare to actualize within a piece, to see one so wholly expressed where it feels like some endpoint. I sense Soko inspires that like some cinema muse. It's hard to talk about it rationally, same as dance.
Review of The Dancer
