LA TIMES: Review: After a fall, a ballet dancer rediscovers her passion in upbeat ‘Rise’
June 2, 2023
Dance movies don’t usually start by injuring their central protagonists — even “Black Swan” held its dosing of madness in check for maximum second-half impact. But when a young Parisian ballet star is hobbled by a broken bone and a broken heart at the beginning of French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch’s “Rise,” it merely triggers the meaningful recovery and renewal animating this breezy, charming love letter to the art form, its tightknit communities, and what nourishes the impulse to find healing expression in movement.
In other words, this occasionally meandering, openly life-affirming confection is in direct contrast to the torqued and tortured “Black Swan.” But it’s even the opposite of a beloved classic like 1948’s “The Red Shoes,” which, while thrillingly lush and exhilarating in depicting dance, offered a more torrential view of the human passions surrounding it. There is one similarity to “The Red Shoes,” however, in the fact that “Rise,” too, boasts a star-making turn from an acting newcomer: ballet-trained Paris Opera principal Marion Barbeau, a camera natural who calls up the same lived-in authenticity that made Moira Shearer’s screen debut so galvanizing.
