MIFF NOTES: Reset (2016, Dirs. Thierry Demaiziere, Alban Teurlai)

Many years ago, a housemate of mine had a "friend" over. Before politely absenting myself from their newly blossoming connection, we all shared a pot of tea. Later that evening, when the gentleman visitor had gone, my housemate shared with me an observation of his that she had found interesting. Apparently, as soon as I left the room he had said to her that he saw me as a frustrated artist. It is something he recognised in the space of five minutes.

He's probably right.

That same housemate recommended I read Julia Cameron's 'The Artist's Way', which she promptly lent me and I promptly read, predominantly through tears.

Artistic expression, actual artistic expression, is still something high on my "to do" list. I'm still not quite ready for that level of exposure. I still feel the need inside me (frustrating me) but I hold it at bay. This writing helps.

To be honest, it doesn't surface as much as it used to. I don't run in the same circles anymore - not being around artists makes lack of expression less pressing.

Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai's Reset (Relève) brought it all back with a vengeance. It put me straight back into contact with an artist, cinematically at least. The artist in question is Benjamin Millepied, famed dancer, choreographer and current director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet. The film, which follows Millepied through 39 clocked days in August and September last year as he was preparing, choreographing, designing, and project managing his first piece for his first season at the Paris Opera Ballet. At the same time as he was preparing, choreographing, designing, and project managing that piece, he was mentoring, teaching, enlivening, remoulding and essentially promoting his new generation of dancers (the piece is pointedly given over to dancers from the corps de ballet, not the company's principals). And, as if any more stress was needed, on top of all this, Millipied was revamping, repositioning, cobweb-dusting, digitalising, democratising, diversifying, revitalising and generally managing the modernisation of the Paris Opera Ballet itself.

There is a lot to cram into 39 days.

The tick-tockery of Demaizière and Teurlai's approach gives Reset and its intersection of management and creation a hyper-drama that is difficult to stay apart from. With Alice Moine's propulsive editing, intercut with bold countdown titles, the film sweeps the audience up with a dancers' precision.

The almost-immediate entanglement of bodies and music, initially Millepied's then his eight dancers, is a rapturous evocation of kinetic expression. At Millepied's insistence, it is joyously playful. It tears through complacency. It sets the heart and the mind to flight.

These blooms of creativity come in snatches, Reset is also a document of the petit complications that plague the director's days and frustrate the choreographic charge pulsing between his temples. The letters he has to sign. The boxes he needs constructed. The strikes he needs to navigate.

The dancers' health, too, takes up mind space, primarily due to Millepied's commitment to refocusing the institution on its dancers, an act that quite literally starts from the ground up. His holistic approach to their well-being sets Millepied at odds with the general conception of ballet master as sadistic slave driver (cf. Black Swan, which Millepied himself choreographed and danced in). It also sets him at odds with the establishment (the stifling order of those up above and the rigidness of those on the stage).

This is the underlying tension that Demaizière and Teurlai lock into, and, expectedly, it finds its purest expression in Millepied's insistent 35 minutes of movement. His battle to find the space to conceive it, to coax it into form, and to allow it to speak through the limbs of eight classically trained dancers, is also the fight to bring a new mode of expression into the Paris Opera Ballet's pristine, elitist halls. It is an act of moral creation that goes hand in hand with the artistic. I wanted to applaud that.

If I have any issues, it is that Demaizière and Teurlai don't give much of an opportunity to. After such an intense journey, I hoped to sink into the performance as a whole-of-body celebration of what has come before. I wanted more of the stage, of the lighting, of Nico Muhly's music, of Millepied's kinetic philosophising.

I wanted to revel in the creation.

Because people like Millepied cup that spark in me.

★★★★☆

Trailer:

Reset screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.