PAVLOVA, A WOMAN FOR ALL TIME

1983, 155 minutes, Colour.
Galina Belyayeva.
Directed by Emil Loteanu.

Pavlova, A Woman For All Time is an Anglo- Russian co-production. It is an ambitious film but falls far short of its ambitions.

It is an old-fashioned kind of cine-biography. It outlines some of the facts of Anna Pavlova's life and career, presents her dancing, but gives very little insight into the woman and feel for her ambitions and career.

Galina Beliaeva is quite attractive as the dancer. There is a group of international stars supporting her from James Fox as Victor d'Andre, presented as a fashionable man, an aristocrat and official who falls in love with her, is extravagant with her and buys a house for her. How~ ever, he falls into financial troubles and Pavlova rescues him. They move to England. In fact, the film is designed as a flashback memoir by d'Andre.

More interesting is the portrait of Michael Fokine, the dancer-choreographer with whom she studied and with whom she danced for Diaghalev. He is presented as an exile in America, having achieved some success, while she is a touring exile. There are guest portraits by Bruce Forsyth as Alfred Batt, the English entrepreneur and Martin Scorsese as Gatti Cassaza, the manager of New York's Metropolitan Theatre. Roy Kinnear also appears as a gardener.

The film captures something of the atmosphere of Leningrad before the Revolution, of Diaghalev and his dancers in Paris, including Fokine and Nijinsky. It shows Pavlova dancing for the impresario in popular theatre in England. It also shows Pavlova's own company, with humiliation of a midnight performance in New York but a great success. It also shows her touring especially in South America. It also shows her illness and her death in Holland.

Of interest to a broad audience - but the equivalent of, say, a Reader's Digest portrait of a famous dancer.