The dance sequences were wonderful - all credit to Soko who did her own dancing, Fanny Sage who was body double to the delightful Lily Depp, and dance adviser US artist Jody Sperling a major dancer and innovative performer in her own right, whose work is excellently showcased here. I loved the intelligent and exciting re-staging of Fuller's dances and the more conceptual scene of Duncan's overtly erotic lap dance rapidly clearing multiple rooms of elderly fearful conservative white males - Kristeva meets Busby Berkley. Go to see the film for these breathtaking sequences alone
It was good to see a female director tackling a female subject
However the plot was inaccurate and ridiculous and clichéd in a manner that would be expected of Hollywood say in the 1950s. about 95% of the story apart from the dancing was made up. The decadent male junkie significant other and sponsor/art fund-er was an invention, the Montana/Wyoming childhood - possibly filmed in the Czech Republic was totally made up - although its nods in styling and lighting to those Europhile fantasies of the wild west - Heaven's Gate and the Hateful Eight were nice Easter eggs, the weird puritan temperance colony in New York where Fuller's on screen mother lived - adorned with a surprising amount of Catholic kitsch for a fundamentalist protestant cult - totally invented, the ignoring of Fuller's primary same-same lifestyle and the casting of Isadora Duncan as a duplicitous ambitious lesbian - All About Eve rang they wanted their plot line - makes the film down right homophobic And let's not mention the modernist myth of the outsider misunderstood genius battling through with courage and persistence ... yawn yawn yawn
It was good to see a female director tackling a female subject
However the plot was inaccurate and ridiculous and clichéd in a manner that would be expected of Hollywood say in the 1950s. about 95% of the story apart from the dancing was made up. The decadent male junkie significant other and sponsor/art fund-er was an invention, the Montana/Wyoming childhood - possibly filmed in the Czech Republic was totally made up - although its nods in styling and lighting to those Europhile fantasies of the wild west - Heaven's Gate and the Hateful Eight were nice Easter eggs, the weird puritan temperance colony in New York where Fuller's on screen mother lived - adorned with a surprising amount of Catholic kitsch for a fundamentalist protestant cult - totally invented, the ignoring of Fuller's primary same-same lifestyle and the casting of Isadora Duncan as a duplicitous ambitious lesbian - All About Eve rang they wanted their plot line - makes the film down right homophobic And let's not mention the modernist myth of the outsider misunderstood genius battling through with courage and persistence ... yawn yawn yawn