From Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the most famous dance partners on the screen, Katharine Hepburn would have said that he had given his class, while giving him sex appeal. Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan each have the two qualities at the shovel, when they took charge of teaming up for a Terpsichiorian collaboration on the London scene? In 2007, the French actor Oscarized and the British dancer Honoré royally had reached the heights of their respective professions – but although the two were accomplished artists, Binoché was not a professional dancer, while Khan was not a dramatic actor. Unveiled at the National Theater of the United Kingdom in September 2008, the hybrid play “In-I” was the striking result of a mutual effort to train each other in these disciplines; 17 years later, the documentary led by Binoche “In-I in motion” preserved it in its favorite medium.
It is not a reflective work. Completely assembled from sequences of large studio rehearsals and recording live live from the finished stage production, “in-i in motion” is free from voiceover, interviews or any type of framing commentary to establish how Binoche and Khan, also far from their improbable experience, now allow the result and what they fired. The documentary rather offers viewers a gross access to the creation process and the rare fascination to look at two leading artists sometimes out of their depth, determining new dimensions to their job on the shoe, so to speak.
At 156 minutes, Binoche’s film does not pose the depth and difficulty of this process, and also requires a little engagement of the spectator. Beginning his festival race in San Sebastian, the DOC is mainly interesting for dance lovers and the faithful of the two artists, but can end up courting a subset of the public for cinema events of cross theater like the NT Live outings of the National NT Theater. One wonders why Binoche, who officially marks his start to make films with this unique specialty element, waited for this long to assemble it for the screen, although perhaps the DOC benefits from a critical distance. It is clear that she considers “in-i”, which received mixed examinations at the time, as a major achievement in his current self-education as an actor, but his divisor assignments are clearly presented in this format.
It is a simply structured film of two halves, the first months of rehearsal documentation for the project (mainly in naked and black dance studios) while the second presents the last 70 -minute piece in its entire propulsive and bad mood: process and payment, work and game. There are no dates on the screen to mark the passage of time, although we feel it substantially Initial and conceptual to particular and specific obstacles as the opening night is looming: the film exhausted more drama and farce than you can expect from the delicate engineering of a hidden seat to produce an air of air for the Binoche climb. (All the watching directors who are watching can find themselves sweating cold.)
The play itself is quite simple, tracing the arc of a love story, from the initial craze to the bitterly prolonged break, although it takes a certain time to assess its form from the disarrayed fragments that we see in the studio – Strident buttons of the argument and isolation, the heated physical confrontations, the variety and the temperature of the famous coach American Susan Batson and SU-MSU. The film wins the nerve and the intrigue of palpable – physical and emotional exhaustion – among the two artists at points of these rehearsals.
This effilement can lead to their most immediate work, as in Khan’s tackle of a vulnerable monologue centered on racial identity and insecurity, or their most unruly: it is often the big dirty laugh of Binoche which breaks the tension of a movement or a scene which simply did not come together. Revealing, the DP of all this material is the sister of Binoche, Marion Stalens: confidence and intimacy are operating words in this candid section of the project, during which the artists are authorized to fail and flesh out, and we are allowed to look at them.
The final staging, of course, is a completely more polished affair, improved by a camera that moves with the stars while they slide, linked and fall into and out of love. It is rather a cinematographic work even without the participation of the camera, even starting with a love meeting at first sight in a cinema – created in a evocative way via sparkling and sparkling light effects on the austere Merlot walls of a minimalist by the artist Turner Prix Anish Kapoor.
But “in-i in motion” takes advantage of the donation of the close-up, in particular because the extraordinary face of Binoche articulates contradictory rinsing of feeling that his inexpected dance, for all his progress compatible with repetition, cannot be as precisely. Even without dance shoes, Binoché is an experienced artist, but she remains one of the great intrepid emotions of cinema, better seen and felt with as little distance as possible: almost two decades of the origin of the “in-i” project, this cinematographic translation resembles a kind of return.
