Interesting experiment, fails as a documentary
"Pina" was a mixed bag for me. I’m an avid fan of dance, but I will admit I was never that familiar with Pina Bausch’s repertoire. I didn't know much about her going into the film and unfortunately I knew just as little leaving the theatre.
"Pina" is less a documentary than a montage of tributes to her memory, performed affectionately by members of her academy past and present. It also showcases snippets from her most famous works over the last 2 decades. Visually the film is spectacular and is probably one of the few films I’ve seen this year to actually benefit from being in stereoscopic 3-D. The sense of depth is powerful and involving for the audience, making them feel like they are in the midst of the dancers as they twirl, sweat, leap and thrash about the stage.
The imagery is stark, painterly and epic at times, most notably in extracts from the dark, primal piece The Rite Of Spring in which the dancers’ anguished, fearful expressions tell a hundred stories. Throughout the film there are moments of artistic genius, surreal giggles and feats of awe-inspiring technical skill.
However there are also those unavoidable moments of sheer boredom, confusion and eye-rolling pomposity, which unfortunately for me, summed up the bulk of the experience.
At around 40 minutes in, I began to feel the film's length and its initial intrigue soon turned into an endurance test. Structurally it is a pell-mell assortment of dance excerpts, interviews and the odd sepia hued shot of Pina rehearsing or conveying words of wisdom to her students. Very little is said about the woman herself except that she was a perfectionist and a passionate lover of art; a vignette that could be used to describe most people in the world of performance, I would think. Every so often the dancing would break to reveal a past colleague or pupil of hers hamming into the camera while an effusive voiceover recalled the little clichéd anecdotes she would offer to inspire each one of them to dance, a method which in my view felt insincere and unsatisfying.
With so little factual information given about the artist, I could only engage on a superficial, sensory level with the dancing. As I mentioned, one cannot help being captivated by the visceral power of The Rite of Spring, or the frantic humour of Dance Hall, but some of the tribute pieces just seemed abstract to the point of being inaccessible and annoying. For example: a man dressed in a tutu rides a mining cart doing ballet squats. He falls on his back, gets up and starts squatting again. This happens several times until the cart slowly and puzzlingly rolls out of frame. In another scene, entitled “Lean on Me” the camera trucks out on a woman in a yellow dress swaying precariously from side to side into the arms of a man. It all looks very elegant, however the same concept appears earlier in another tribute, with a different couple, only the woman falls face first instead of sideways.
The repetition of motifs in dance is to be expected, but in so many different pieces all randomly edited together the amount of repetition is staggering. I could almost predict when a dancer was going to fall to the floor and spasm, whip their hair back and gesture to their heart. By the time the scene of the woman getting soil shovelled on her back arrived, I felt sufficiently numb enough to walk out, which I would’ve done had my dancer friends not been sitting bug eyed with rapt attention either side of me.
I think had Wenders given a more honest investigation into Pina’s life and perhaps left the more bizarre and uninspiring tribute clips as DVD extras, it might’ve been a better film. I must say, any future dance features should be shot in 3-D, because if "Pina" hadn’t benefitted so much from this medium I probably wouldn’t have even given it a 5/10.