Review of the film “Joyka” by James Napier

“Joyka” by New Zealand director James Napier has been released – another film about the thorny path of a ballerina and the horrors of the backstage, this time – the backstage of the Moscow State Academy of Arts and the Bolshoi Theater. The consultant and understudy for the main character was her prototype, Joy Womack. Tells Tatiana Kuznetsova.

“The film is based on real events,” reads the title at the end of the film. The events are truly real, right down to the name of the heroine: American Joy Womack was nicknamed Joyka in Moscow due to the local habit of being familiar with names. In 2012, she graduated from the Moscow Academy of Choreography, was accepted into the Bolshoi Theater, danced there for a year, was almost not involved in the repertoire and left with a scandal, giving a series of revealing interviews. A certain employee of the Bolshoi, an American woman told the media, explained to her that for the role she needed to pay $10 thousand or acquire a high-status lover. General Director Vladimir Urin demanded to name the extortionists and sue them, promising to conduct an official investigation. Joy Womack did not follow the path of the law, but found a job in another Moscow troupe, where she danced premier roles. However, after three years the ballerina left there too, worked in Russia, and in South Korea, and in the USA, she did not stay anywhere, but she did not allow herself to be forgotten: the story of her life in Moscow became the subject of several documentaries, and now the first feature film has been released .

New Zealander James Napier wrote the script himself, collecting all the cliches with which the world of ballet is usually flooded in commercial cinema. Sadistic teachers who voluptuously torment students mentally and physically. Masochistic teenagers who drive themselves to the point of anorexia and are ready to pour glass into their competitors’ pointe shoes. Young terpsichoresses are injured from unbearable stress, drink pills by the handful, inject stimulants and swallow disgusting food, and artistic directors sell them to lustful sponsors. Blood, sweat, and tears flow in streams in the film, abundantly moistening the psychological thriller with naturalistic but implausible details.

The director’s fetish is women’s legs. He savors close-ups of bare toes wrapped in bloody bandages and bloody stains on canvas slippers (Joika doesn’t practice in pointe shoes), although it’s completely impossible to wipe off his feet with these soft shoes. In the rehearsal hall, the director places an iron pin – the heroine runs into it, practicing the Esmeralda variation in the dead of night in the meager light of the duty lamp; this deep laceration will bleed profusely on the morning of rehearsal. A close-up shows an ankle worn to a crimson color (with ribbons, no less), and – at its apotheosis – a swollen, broken (as diagnosed by a backstage doctor) leg: on it, Joyka courageously turns 32 fouettés, causing an ovation from the jury of the international competition.

Shots of mutilated legs are interspersed with close-ups of the unhappy face of a young martyr: Talia Ryder, a rising star of US independent cinema, does not suffer only in the prologue, when her heroine, full of bright hopes, leaves her large loving family to go to the Moscow Mecca of classical ballet. The thin face of the young actress, gradually brought by the make-up artists to the extreme degree of exhaustion, throughout the entire 110 minutes of the film expresses a mixture of fear, anguish and inflexibility in various combinations. The heroine’s torment is aggravated by the expressive decorations of the ballet dungeon. Gray-green walls, black linoleum, brown painted doors, the official office of the headmistress with office folders of personal files – the ominous interiors of the “Moscow Academy” were filmed in Poland.

A separate curiosity is the teaching methodology. The great ballerina and teacher Tatyana Volkova screams (Diane Kruger) “higher, higher, higher!!!” at the moment when her students, to the music of the Chinese dance from “The Nutcracker,” do plie at the barre, that is, they simply squat. This paradoxical demand casts doubt not even on the teacher’s knowledge, but on the teacher’s sanity, as do tirades like “Russian ballet is a showcase!”, which she spews instead of comments. However, the teacher in the men’s class is even more extravagant: he hits the supporting legs of the students standing in an arabesque with all his might until they fall to the floor – Joyka underwent this execution, asking to go to the boys’ class to strengthen endurance and receiving permission with the wording: “ If you don’t act like a fucking ballerina.”

The main problem of the film is that the brilliant Joyka dances clearly worse than her rivals. Actress Talia Ryder, who studied the classics as a child, can hold her body, spin a little and spread her arms in port de bras, but she cannot stand on pointe shoes. Therefore, the heroine’s dances are literally divided in half: a close-up up to Talia’s waist and a separate shot of the real Joy Womack’s legs. It looks like the understudy has lost her professional skills, since they don’t show us any difficulties, only transitions. And it is absolutely impossible to understand what is so remarkable about a student who spends nights practicing two pirouettes on her toes and still falls off them.

But (and probably contrary to the author’s intention) in the film it turns out that the main rival of the heroine, who got the main role in “Paquita” (Erica Horwood, by the way, looks much more professional than Joyka), was set up by the future husband of the American woman (Oleg Ivenko), without squeezing Natasha out upper arabesque on a ballet run-through. But he lifted Joyka easily, which caused inexplicable delight among those present: the artistic director accepted the schoolgirl into the troupe, and the stern teacher Volkova, crying, babbled: “This is a miracle!” However, the happiness was short-lived: the teacher-director was fired from the school – as we are hinted, because the American taught better than the Russian. And Joyka, who finally decided to give herself to the oligarch, is forced to resign from the theater, because at the last moment she gave up, preferring the job of a cleaner in a public toilet to a thick wad of money.

However, the film about the terrible backstage of ballet ends with a happy ending: Joyka, looking up from washing toilets, together with dancer Mikhail Martynyuk, performs at a competition in Varna and wins silver. There is, however, a slight distortion of reality here. Joy actually won the competition, only at that time she was not working as a cleaner, but as a ballerina in the Kremlin Ballet troupe. But the film is silent about this: dancing in the Kremlin is not the best recommendation for successfully working with the German innovative brand of pointe shoes with a modular system, which 30-year-old Joy Womack happily does in her free time from self-presentation.