Manon and the Movies

“I bet Kenneth’s had time to see at least two films,” joked the Royal Ballet’s Margot Fonteyn during a flight delay on the way to Portugal. Kenneth MacMillan, then a shy young dancer still to reveal his talents as the company’s choreographer, was already regarded endearingly as a film buff. Born into a working-class family that owned few books, MacMillan was a cinema-goer from early childhood. Films were his first window to the world and the source of inspiration for many of his ballets. “If you wanted to find him, you went wherever the latest film was showing,” recalled his close friend Jefferey Solomon. “He’d often go to three or four films a day – on his own or with people.”

MacMillan’s career coincided with an era of wildly creative exchange between ballet and the silver screen. The postwar ballet boom prompted a slew of movies that incorporated ballet into their plotlines or brought stage productions directly to screen – Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) undoubtedly the most famous today. For MacMillan, exchange between the mediums ran in both directions, his dance-making reflecting film aesthetics and the topicality of big-screen narratives. Somnambulism, his first commission for the Royal Ballet in 1953, took inspiration from the sinister Expressionist design of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), while Valley of Shadows (1983), depicting the persecution of a Jewish-Italian family under fascism, was presaged by the release of Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970).

Manon, premiered in 1974, was also a response to cinematic storytelling: the 1968 release of Jean Aurela’s Manon 70 sparked MacMillan’s interest in the original novella by Antoine Francois Prevost. Starring a glamorous Catherine Deneuve as the mercurial, bouffant-blonde Manon, Aurela’s film updated Prevost’s 1731 tale by setting her tempestuous liaison with Des Grieux^ against a backdrop of airport lounges, fashion shows and sun-drenched yachts on the French Riveria. While Des Grieux was reimagined as a radio journalist, the lecherous “M. de G** M**” of the novel became an American oilman with a foot fetish. MacMillan’s ballet echoes the visuals of Aurela’s movie in Manon’s provocative display of her crossed legs and Monsieur G.M.’s attentions to her feet.

However, an earlier Manon by French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot was also familiar to MacMillan, its influence subtly registering in MacMillan’s fearless dramatizing of death scenes in defiance of polite balletic conventions. Released in 1949 and featuring the petite dancer-actress Cécile Aubry, Clouzot’s film offered a far darker retelling of Prevost’s plot, introducing Manon as a pretty blonde ingénue and suspected Nazi sympathiser, and concluding with a harrowing massacre of refugees and the lovers’ deaths in the Near East. In its final moments, the film represents the grotesquerie of death as the grief-stricken Dégrieux drags Manon’s corpse across the sands, eventually grasping her by the feet to hang, dangling, down his back.

The films’ formative influence on MacMillan’s vision was reflected initially by his insistence on a blonde wig for his own Manons, until later interpreters, including Alessandra Ferri, demanded wigs that matched their natural hair colour. The impact of MacMillan’s film-going endures today in the exceptional coherence and layering of his scene direction. It lingers too in Manon’s expression of the principle MacMillan championed: ballet, like film, could be a conduit for both beauty and provocation.

^Name spellings as used in the works mentioned.