One morning in 2013, Bolshoi Ballet artistic director Sergei Filin had acid thrown in his face in the street by a masked attacker. While he endured numerous operations to save his sight and minimise scarring, Moscow police secured a confession from another dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, who admitted coveting Filin’s job and paying a couple of thugs to beat him up, although he denied wanting or ordering anything as horrible as acid. Case closed? Not at all. This fascinating documentary suggests the attack was a collective pathological symptom: the tip of modern Russia’s rage iceberg.
The Bolshoi (Russian for “big”) has always been a colossal monolith of patriotic importance and cultural prestige, yet behind its dancers’ clenched poise there is suppressed agony. Budgetary and artistic decisions are ratified by unseen Kremlin bureaucrats and directors’ casting prerogatives until recently gave them almost Stalinist powers to change dancers’ lives on a whim. This, added to the fact that decades of corruption have left Russians with a profound mistrust of authority anyway, made Filin’s position uniquely dangerous.
The film reveals that while Dmitrichenko was on trial, Bolshoi dancers circulated a petition addressed to Vladimir Putin questioning his guilt, though there was no other suspect. Bolshoi Babylon chillingly hints that the acid-throwing commanded some unconscious support: a pathological gesture of secret despairing resentment at everything and everyone in power in Russia.
When Filin returns to work, visibly wounded and wearing dark glasses, his very presence clearly unsettles everyone. A general manager is appointed over his head, a grizzled arts apparatchik called Vladimir Urin who already detests Filin after a professional quarrel elsewhere. He evidently has a “glasnost” brief to make the Bolshoi casting process more transparent and less open to petty obsessive rivalries, yet even this notionally progressive move is managed with autocratic brusqueness.
At any rate, the remarkable access the film-makers enjoyed here may be down to this supposed reform: they even get an interview with prime minister Dimitri Medvedev. The end result, interestingly, is to make Filin look even more embattled and enigmatically silent.
When I sat down to this disturbing film, I wondered if I was going to compare it to Darren Aronofsky’s ballet drama Black Swan (2010). Actually, I thought more of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), based on the Elfriede Jelinek novel, a shocking tale of dysfunction, showing that the discipline needed for classical music creates violence and pain as a hidden byproduct, like nuclear waste.
