Dancer is a documentary about the Ukrainian-born “bad boy” of the ballet world who became the Royal Ballet’s youngest principal dancer in 2009 at the age of 19.
Backstage at the National Opera of Kiev, Sergei Polunin holds an unmarked vial of liquid up at the camera. "For my heart," he says with an impish smile, then knocks its contents back in one gulp. He's dressed in a Romantic-period costume – a peasant vest, chiffon sleeves, tights and dramatic makeup – but his mind is in an altogether different era. "I hear this was made for the U.S. Army," he says after drinking a second vial. "I won't even remember the performance. … In a bit, I will get so high."
Cue Black Sabbath's Iron Man blaring in the background as the camera tracks Polunin through the theatre's corridors to a leaping entrance on stage.
It's an ominous beginning for Steve Cantor's Dancer, a documentary about the Ukrainian-born "bad boy" of the ballet world who became the Royal Ballet's youngest principal dancer in 2009 at the age of 19. In London, Polunin consistently received rave reviews for his performances. He was also known for his numerous tattoos and erratic behaviour, boasting of onstage drug use and tweeting about after-hours partying in an industry typically thought to be abstinent and restrained. After merely two years with one of the world's most prestigious companies, Polunin announced he was tired of dancing and quit.
Polunin's fame beyond the ballet world came once the dust of that scandal had settled. In 2015, a YouTube video of him dancing to Hozier's rousing Take Me to Church, directed by David LaChapelle, went viral with almost 16 million views. It shows Polunin leaping around a barn-like structure flooded with natural light, executing magnificent tours en l'air followed by dramatic floor work. The video has inspired all kinds of copycat uploads – (some especially cute ones are shown in the documentary) – and has given ballet a flash of street cred when it's often thought of as conservative and staid.
But if the video makes ballet seem edgy and relevant, Cantor's film does anything but. The documentary paints a portrait of a kid pushed into ballet by a somewhat desperate family; what emerges is a story of sacrifice and suffering with a cipher at its centre. "I didn't choose ballet," Polunin explains later. "It was my mother's choice."
Growing up in poverty in 1990s Ukraine, Polunin's family splits up in order to pay for Sergei's training – the father goes to Portugal to work as a gardener, the grandmother to Greece to care for an elderly woman. Left at home with her son, the young mother becomes a doting and demanding single parent.
The twisting psychology of family love, pressure and resentment make for the best parts of the documentary, and there's a range of early archival footage to show this. There are also some illuminating contemporary interviews with the parents and both grandmothers, shedding insight on years of loneliness and sacrifice. "We were a team, all hope on this young boy," Sergei's father says. Family and ballet become part of the same mythology, so when his parents divorce while he's boarding at the Royal Ballet School, it undermines the teenager's reason for dancing. He excels at school and wins accolades but the success feels shallow. Later, he tells us in voiceover that he'd always wished he would get injured and have an excuse to stop dancing once and for all.
But Polunin keeps on dancing, even beyond the YouTube video, which he'd originally intended as a swan song to his career. The reasons why he continues aren't effectively probed by Cantor, and we're left with little understanding of what meaning ballet really has in his life. It's depressing to witness a young man fall back into habits that brought him little happiness – and there's tons of cinematic potential in exploring this defeatism. But instead of letting the film sit in that rich and dark ambiguity, Cantor glosses over it, even gesturing toward a happy ending. And while there's plenty of footage of Polunin executing multiple pirouettes and twisting acrobatically through the air, real ballet fans will lament the lack of evidence of emotion and artistry in his dancing.