Movies: The White Crow

Inspired by Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh

Have you heard the phrase “giving back”? This euphemism for altruism is repudiated in a recent film honoring a historic emancipation from slavery 60 years ago. Its use comes in a scene in which a powerful woman rejects a plea from a selfish young man who is at her mercy. The female’s a bureaucrat. The youngster is an artist pleading for the right to create for his own sake. The woman—representing the rise of the “new woman” in the world’s bloodiest dictatorship—orders the artist to obey, commanding the individual to “give back” to the Collective. The artist rises, standing before the bureaucrat controlling his life. He turns his head. He expresses the disgust which precedes and feeds his ultimate act of defiance.

The artist portrayed is Rudolf Nureyev. The dictatorship is Soviet Russia. The movie is The White Crow. Ralph Fiennes, who’s starred in many movies, including The English Patient, Schindler’s List and Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, has made an outstanding film about what happens when one man chooses to break free from slavery. The scene with the bureaucrat marks a vital turning point in Nureyev’s passionate, amazing life.

Inspired by Julie Kavanagh’s exhaustive 2007 biography recently reviewed on Autonomia (read my review here)—to my knowledge, her book has largely been ignored—The White Crow unfolds in three revolving vignettes. The final part dramatizes Nureyev’s defection from Soviet Russia at an airport in Paris. The first part depicts Nureyev’s impoverished boyhood. The middle part—comprising most of the two-hour film—portrays Nureyev’s journey from Leningrad (now and previously St. Petersburg) to Paris. You probably know that Nureyev was a dancer. You may know he was a ballet dancer. You may not know that Nureyev became one of the world’s greatest dancers. 

That Nureyev did is both entirely and essentially because he chose to be free. That he was at liberty to dance according to his own judgment is also both entirely and essentially traceable to a single moment when he exercised free will. His escape was an act of courage—Nureyev was the first high profile slave to defect from the barbaric regime Soviet refugee Ayn Rand rightly called a slave state—and The White Crow skillfully shows what happened, where, when, how and, especially, why.

The White Crow is not about dance, except to the degree necessary to dramatize Nureyev’s enslavement, plight and choice to seek asylum in the West, as future refugees *Baryshnikov, Godunov, Shevchenko, Polovchak and Elian would later do, too. The White Crow is not fundamentally political; this is instead the story of a boy, retarded by Communism, who finds, admires and studies greatness and escapes after explicitly rejecting “giving back”—the predominant philosophy that destroys, chokes and punishes pursuing and being one’s best. Director Fiennes also accounts for sexual abuse, repression and suppression. Additionally, Fiennes portrays Nureyev’s subversive teacher, Alexander Pushkin, in a measured performance echoing the untold agony of slaves everywhere—dead and living—whose voices are silenced, finishing with a pulsating climax in Paris. A single scene crystallizes Nureyev’s choice. Depicting the child’s memory of an expression on his mother’s face, and the act of bravery which follows, the boy once ordered to “give back” realizes that he owns himself. The White Crow, finely written by David Hare, well crafted by Fiennes and well acted by the cast, dramatizes that which is possible when one acts on one’s knowledge of reality in a truly selfish and single-minded pursuit of life.

*If you do not (but want to) know these names, send a message to: scottholleran@substack.com