You do not need to be a balletomane to enjoy Ballets Russes, one of the most engrossing and delightful films I've seen this year. In fact, its co-directors, Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, were not regular ballet-goers when they were invited six years ago to record a reunion of Ballets Russes performers in New Orleans. Nearly 100 dancers, many of whom hadn't seen each other for decades, turned up for the occasion, and it's used as the framing device for this latest addition to the new golden age of movie documentaries that we're living in.

Using new interviews, archive material, amateur films, still photographs, clips from Hollywood films, newspaper headlines, old posters and programmes, they have created a remarkable work of cultural history. It begins with the crisis caused by the death in 1929 of Sergei Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes had dominated and extended the world of ballet since the turn of the century. Who could succeed him?
After a brief hiatus, two very different figures, the reserved, gentlemanly French aesthete René Blum and the tough, spiky former Russian cavalry officer Colonel W de Basil, came together to pick up the baton and re-form the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo with George Balanchine as ballet master. Balanchine had the brilliant notion of engaging three pre-teenagers, daughters of impoverished middle-class Russian émigrés studying at small ballet classes in Paris.

They were Tatiana Riabouchinska and Irina Baronova, both now in their late eighties and talking eloquently in this film, and the late Tamara Toumanova, whose work is recorded on film, including a famous appearance in the climactic sequence of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. They were nicknamed 'the Baby Ballerinas' and were a sensational success, bringing ballet into the popular imagination while threatening, for a while at least, the careers of more mature dancers.

From then on, the movie is a series of dramas and intrigues, played out against the background of national and international events, beginning with the Russian Revolution and spanning the Second World War. It's rather like The Red Shoes transformed into an epic saga. Balanchine is edged out of the company by rival choreographer Leonide Massine, and in 1936, Blum and de Basil fall out and form two rival companies, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Colonel W de Basil's Original Ballet Russe. Some dancers stay with de Basil, others go with Blum. The pair compete for talent and patronage and, in the late 1930s, both play to capacity audiences at London theatres a brief walk apart, Blum's company at Drury Lane, the colonel's at Covent Garden.

With the coming of the Second World War, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo secures a major lead with the financial backing of liquor tycoon Julius Fleischman and under the management of Russian banker Sergei Denham. The company moves to America on a permanent basis with the mighty impresario Sol Hurok arranging its appearances across the country. Meanwhile, the colonel's Original Ballet Russe, after a triumphant visit to Australia, is frozen out of the States and forced to tour South America where the sets get steadily tattier and the performers often go hungry and unpaid.

The movie vividly conveys what it was like to bring ballet to audiences ignorant and suspicious of this fancy art. Though there was nothing comparable with the reception of Diaghilev's notorious 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, the impact in the straitlaced Midwest of such outré works as Bacchanale with Dali's outlandish sets was considerable and as described here extremely funny.

Very soon, however, the dancers became celebrities, appearing in Hollywood movies. And when the company brought in Agnes De Mille, her Rodeo introduced a new style of dancing that anticipated her work on Oklahoma!, though, as we learn, it wasn't immediately popular with the classically trained Europeans. It also attracted new local dancers, most famously the native-Americans Maria Tallchief, who was married for a while to Balanchine, as well as one of the first African-American classical dancers, Raven Wilkinson. But because of racist hostility, Wilkinson was prevented from touring in the South and eventually moved to Europe.

By the 1950s, both companies had fulfilled their roles of bringing the message to the public and were being overtaken by the proliferation of innovative competitors, most especially Balanchine's New York City Ballet. De Basil's company folded in 1952, while the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo limped on for a further decade, not helped by Sergei Denham's obsession with promoting young Polish dancer Nina Novak, who appears in the film. This matter is dealt with frankly, as is the grand lifestyle of Leonide Massine, which took an excess proportion of the company's limited finances.

Probably what is most impressive about this picture is the dedication of everyone to the ballet - as performers, innovators, bearers of tradition and teachers. In beautiful and handsome old age, they're still seen to be working on stage, in universities and running ballet schools from Beverly Hills to Copenhagen.
There is a beautiful moment when George Zoritch, who trained with 'the Baby Ballerinas' in Paris and is now professor emeritus of dance at the University of Arizona, joins one of his old partners to recreate a few steps from a pas de deux they'd done more than 70 years ago. Suddenly, they start talking to each other in Russian.

Ballets Russes Interview

David and Margaret Stratton speak with Directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine:

DAYNA GOLDFINE: Alicia Markova, who was the only surviving member of the original Ballet Russes Company, was 94 when she passed away in December. She was 92 when we interviewed her and she was still going out many, many days of the week and coaching young dancers.

DAN GELLER: And then there's Freddy Franklin, who was, at 91 years of age, about three weeks ago on stage performing a character role with the American Ballet Theatre. This is the level of his good health and his enthusiasm for what he does. That's part of the fun of doing this movie for the two of us, that we've gotten to spend an awful lot of time with people who are vibrant in their later years. Even though we've lost some of them, in the course of filming five people have died, they were vibrant up until their very last days.

DAYNA GOLDFINE: And I have to say that some of our distributors have said, "We'd like to bring Freddy Franklin for the Toronto Film Festival," for instance, and they expect it to be quite easy because, of course, these people are in their 80s and 90s, what are they possibly doing? I said, "If you want to bring Freddy to anything, you need to give him at least two to three months notice because the man never stops." So it's pretty fabulous. Just to schedule two or hours to have a drink with him, when we were in New York about a week ago, it took us a while to negotiate because he was still performing every night.

MARGARET: That's great. What's the lesson in this? Start dancing?

DAYNA GOLDFINE: And don't retire. That's what I've taken from it. If you're doing something that you love, why stop at the normal retirement age? Why not keep going?

DAN GELLER: And have a good snort of vodka or a wine at the end of each day, which they do. Just enjoy life, I think that's some of it. Just stay engaged with young people. We get lovely stories from them about what life was like, but then, almost to a T, they're not living in the past, they're completely engaged with people around them and have a real fondness for spending time with young people, which actually includes us, believe it or not.

MARGARET: It's quite long time to stick with a project, isn't it?

DAYNA GOLDFINE: Five years. But, you know what, it was the most complicated. There were 20 characters, which we've never tried to do; I don't think very many film makers have. It goes through almost 50 years of history and it's a very complicated history. We often have said there was this constant tug of war between these fabulous characters and their personal stories, and then the history. So it took many, many passes to, sort of, meld those two sides.

DAN GELLER: And part of it is because we were not commissioned to make the film. We didn't have a hard and fast deadline to meet. That's both a blessing and a curse.

DAYNA GOLDFINE: We came back from Sundance and we thought, "There is about four extra minutes in that." It sounds like not very much when you're talking about 120 minutes, but getting it down, it was like taking 20 seconds out here and 30 seconds there and it's interesting. It's a stronger film for having taken that extra time. So it premiered on 20 January 2005 and it wasn't really finished until May after that. We re sound mixed it and you can't film forever. There is a certain point when you just have to say nothing is perfect, it's as good as it's going to get.

DAN GELLER: The American film critic, Gene Shallot, years ago said something; I remember it was so long ago. He said, he was describing a movie I don't know what movie it was but he said, "It's not perfect, but if you want perfection, go look at an egg."