Ballet Noir?

I know it is Nutcracker season, and all that, but I just re-watched The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, director, 1946), and my head is filled with visions not of sugarplums but of the magnetism between the young Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Two scenes in particular, seem to have lodged themselves in my visual cortex. In the first, which happens about two thirds of the way through the film when Philip Marlowe goes to the villain Eddie Mars’ private club, Marlowe hears music coming from one of the rooms and goes to check it out. He stands in the doorway and absorbs his initial shock when he realizes that the singer is Vivian Rutledge, the woman with whom he is falling in love while at the same time suspecting her (rightly) of collusion with Mars.

And what is she singing in that voice like a shot of Laphroiag? “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” a 1944 tune with lyrics by Joe Greene that includes the lines, “She's a real sad tomato / She's a busted valentine,” which ought to be funny but, in the context of this scene, are somehow effortlessly erotic.

And Oh MY! That dress! Here is Vivian at her least angelic (throughout the film Marlowe calls her, not without a salty crust of irony, “Angel”), in the midst of her biggest con, singing smokily and boozily about a man who abuses his wife, in what amounts to a bridal gown. Her costumes in this movie (by Leah Rhodes) are so expressive; the first time we see her, she is literally and figuratively wearing the pants (and what pants they are, and how she wears them!), and in another scene, she wears a shimmery, metallic suit jacket that serves as armor while she engages in an extended joust of sexual innuendo with Marlowe, unhorsing him (the metaphors are all based on horse racing) in the end with a casual thrust.

Hello, I am a woman wearing pants, and don't you forget it!

But the wedding-dress in the Cypress Club lounge scene, oy vey! It has a kind of heightening effect, so that the exchange of glances and gestures can be played softly, shading from initial surprise (real on his part, feigned as we already suspect and soon know for certain, on hers), to dismay (his), to amusement (hers), to acknowledgement of the voltage of mutual attraction that seems to leap between them (lifted eyebrow, two finger wave). This is the scene in which Marlowe and Routledge make their wedding vows of a kind, and it is all accomplished through gesture and body language, the way she first pretends not to see him, and then turns partly away before facing him. 

That Bacall was a graceful, even feline, and physical actor is not headline news, obviously, but in this scene she just nails it so perfectly, and one has to feel that the pas-de-deux between her and Bogart is at least in part inspired by the styling of her dress. The white-on-white striped bodice is half zoot-suit (hello, shoulder pads) and half tutu, with the points over the hips giving emphasis to her long, long, very long legs. And Bogart is not so bad himself; he is “not very tall” as Vivian’s little sister Carmen remarks in the opening scene of the film, but he has that slim-hipped, muscular build of a dancer, and when Carmen more or less throws herself into his arms in that same scene, he catches her ably as Fred Astair would catch Ginger. In the Cypress Club scene, all he has to do is stand there, but look at him! He even stands lithe.

Prelude to a kiss: "Will you take this thing out of my mouth?"

Okay, so now the second scene, which is essentially the polar opposite to this one, and also its logical partner, the (figurative) consummation of their (even more metaphorical) marriage. I should note that at this point they have already kissed, and she has grudgingly said, “I guess I’m falling in love with you,” and he has only a little less grudgingly said the same. But then she has played him another dirty trick, so they are not exactly on the same page. Marlowe has pursued Mars’ hitman, the wonderfully named Lash Canino, to a house in the coastal hills where Mars’ wife Mona is hiding out, and where Vivian has also now gone to ground. Canino and the owner of the rural service station attached to the house have knocked Marlowe out and tied him up. He comes to on the floor of the living room, propped up against the sofa. Though still bleary, he cannily gets rid of Mona by pissing her off, so he can be alone with Vivian.

Sexually this scene just sizzles. There’s Marlowe, tied up, beaten up, hopelessly rumpled, physically at her mercy, but still dancing the verbal tango with her. And there’s Vivian Routledge, now dressed in the most fantastic wool-jersey sheath; I cannot decide if it is more “dragon lady” or “female priest”, but either way, it signals her dominance and her inapproachability and is in every way the opposite of that wedding gown she wore at the Cypress Club. It functions as a counterpoint to her transformation, her seduction both of and by Marlowe, as she moves through the scene. She begins standing off from him, towering over him where he is stuck on the floor, but by the end, she is right there with him, jammed into the intimate space between the coffee table and the sofa. The entire arc of lovemaking is sublimated into word-play and choreography. In the end, just before she frees him, they share a cigarette and a moment of post-coital melancholy.

I haven’t seen the whole ballet yet, except for this short clip on the NYCB website : (http://www.nycballet.com/Ballets/F/Funerailles-New-Liszt-Scarlett.aspx) , but the new Liam Scarlett pas-de-deux set to César Franck’s Funérailles that the choreographer set on Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild could potentially be the ballet cousin of The Big Sleep, though I don’t know if it has the film’s sense of fun. It certainly uses costuming to similar effect; Sarah Burton, who is the lead designer at Alexander McQueen, put Peck in a dress that is both totally Goth and yet at the same time wants to be a Vienna-waltz white gown. The bodice has the same slightly sinister, Orientalizing motifs as Bacall’s wool jersey sheath (and in fact of the whole design concept of The Big Sleep, where faux-Chinese aesthetics signal the drug-addled world into which little Carmen has slipped), gold on black, with very sexy flesh-toned cut outs, but underneath this, the full skirt cascades in layers of what looks like silk charmeuse in shades that gradually fade through grey to almost-white. In the clip, the choreography makes maximum use of the gown’s dark-to-light fade.

That said, the concept in Funérailles is more eighteenth-century vampire-chic than film noir. Check out that velvet cutaway coat that Fairchild, a nice, fresh-faced boy from Salt Lake City, sports over his bare torso and his black satin tights. It turns him from the boy next door into a beau tenebre, Vampire Lestat rather than Philip Marlowe. Still and all, this new trend in contemporary ballet of using high-concept costume design not just to complement or augment the choreo, but as integral to the Gesamtkunstwerk, reminds me of classic Hollywood film. And this is a good development, because, one hopes, it leads us away from the cheese-whiz aesthetic that has the tendency to pop up in the form of sequin-spangled hotpants and silly-goose tutus in far too many ballet environments. I still haven’t recovered from the Star Trek costumes and disco choreography at  Ballet West's “Innovations,” a year or two ago, I guess.