Mark Reviews Movies: BIRDS OF PARADISE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 23, 2021

Writer/director Sarah Adina Smith plays with a simple but ever-changing dichotomy between two characters in Birds of Paradise. They're both teenagers and both competing, via an elite ballet academy in Paris, for a spot in a prestigious ballet company. One of these young women seems like the quintessential underdog, and the other looks to be the spoiled and privileged child of a well-to-do family. We know with whom our sympathies should lie, right?

The trick of Smith's movie, based on A.K. Small's novel Bright Burning Stars, is how it repeatedly changes our perspective of these characters. In theory, the characters themselves don't change, as the conflict and rumors and competition mount at the ballet school, but all of that mess eventually reveals what these young women want and, more importantly for the plot, what they're willing to do to obtain those goals. It's an intriguing, if ultimately shallow, experiment in perception and sympathy.

We first meet Kate Sanders (Diana Silvers), an 18-year-old dancer, who has come to Paris all the way from small-town Virginia to achieve her dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. Everyone at the school, from her fellow students to the tough headmistress Madame Brunelle (Jacqueline Bisset), looks down on Kate. She is too tall, isn't polished enough, was once a basketball player, and surely is only at the academy on account of some mistake. Brunelle notes that Kate's abilities might have impressed in the United States, but in Paris, people expect much, much more of their ballerinas.

Then, we meet Marine Elise Durand (Kristine Froseth), another American who lives in Paris, had previously attended the academy, and is returning after a family tragedy on a mission. She comes from a wealthy family: Her mother (played by Caroline Goodall) is the American ambassador to France, and her father (played by Roger Barclay) is an influential businessman. Marine, who prefers to go simply as "M," arrives at the school, expecting to have everything she lost in her absence returned to her.

There's tension between the two dancers almost immediately, especially when Kate mentions that she's at the school on a scholarship, created in memory of a student who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. The mention of his death in such crude terms puts Marine in a rage, slapping Kate until the other dancer punches her in return. When Kate learns the dead dancer was Marine's twin brother, she feels awful. Marine taking over Kate's dorm room, which was previously hers, and ignoring her apology makes it seem as if their differences are irreconcilable.

A lot of this story does come down to such melodrama, which makes Smith's overall intention—to put us through a constant back-and-forth of gaining and losing sympathy for each of these characters—much easier to comprehend. There's a bit of a gag early in Kate and Marine's down-and-up-and-down-again relationship that makes the notion of perspective clear. The two, at a night club and hallucinating from some drug required for admission, get into a kind of dance-off, each one trying to force the other to quit school. From their point of view, it's an intense and graceful scene—set against a black backdrop, with spotlights shining on them and rainbow-colored glitter flying off their bodies. In reality, they're just hopping in place.

That's unintentionally a bit too much how this story ends up feeling. On the surface, it's a high-stakes battle for personal glory, a tale of how obsession can ruin one's body and spirit, and the portrayal of a complicated rivalry-turned-friendship that becomes increasingly tenuous, as the competition dwindles and real or perceived betrayals occur. After realizing they both want the same thing and with the same amount of passion, Kate and Marine team up, taking an oath to win the spot in the company together or not at all, but a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunication puts that alliance and friendship in jeopardy.

Attempting to look any deeper, though, one realizes all of this is surface. There's little to the characters, beyond what we learn at the start and how a couple additional details adjust our understanding of how we should feel about them. Smith's screenplay teases at some tantalizing possibilities (The relationship between the two seems regularly on the verge of turning sexual or romantic, although the movie also goes out of its way to counter that thought) or some insight into what binds these two women (Marine is grieving her dancer brother, and Kate dances because her late mother did and it makes her father, voiced by Vincent D'Onofrio, happy), but the emerging conflict eventually comes down to a series of events that probably could be resolved with a few lines of dialogue.

Of course, that can't happen if there's to be a superficial conflict to test our sympathies for Kate and Marine. We get the point of Birds of Paradise, but there's also a sense that the movie is holding back on some deeper, darker ideas, in order to make the story's characters and ambitions as simple as possible.

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