Étoile

Ellen Willott

Étoile is an Amazon Prime series about the New York and Paris ballet companies’ attempt to resuscitate the dying dance. To drag ballet into the modern day, the heads decide to swap star dancers, conductors, and choreographers for a season, all the while playing up to the media and sheepishly receiving funding from power-hungry businessman, Crispin Shamblee.

The series is made up of eight hour-long episodes. I love hour-long episodes, and the full commitment to the world that they signal. The gorgeous cinematography features long, swooping shots and some kind of camera lens that I don’t have the expertise to name, but everything feels textured and bright, far from the glossiness of your hit Netflix show.

This is a show unabashedly about ballet, in all its beauty, elitism, fierce competition, and history. Dancing makes up whole sections of an episode, a reminder of why they’re there, collectively losing their minds. Étoile luxuriates in the fullness of it all. The scale matches that of a ballet show. There is a huge cast, grand buildings, fabulous costumes. The velvet curtain rises to credits as if you too are in the audience, but you also get the whole scale, in that you see the stage mopped once the show is over.

The claustrophobia of the company buildings is obvious when the show escapes it. You’re on an organic farm, then on an activist boat that’s trying to sabotage a fishing boat, then a homecoming dinner put on for everyone except the daughter coming home. Sitcoms can create this eerie impression that there is nothing beyond the place it is set. Étoile doesn’t block out the world that is most of the characters’ entire world, even as they struggle to escape its orbit and reel at the ridiculousness of it. It is only as the series reaches its culmination that the focus and characters are drawn to the buildings to the exclusion of all else, circling it like moths to a flame.

At the same time, the show is very, very silly. A bull becomes the star of the show. Cheyenne, a fought-over ballet star returns to the company directly from a smelly fishing boat, making everyone she talks to gag. A costume designer blames the bagels of New York for the incorrect distance between a recently-returned dancer’s nipples. Cheyenne talks to her boss’ crotch in a bar late at night then wins an argument with a dolphin impression.

Having watched the first episode, whose opening scenes pan over the cleaner’s daughter practising spins in the moonlight of an empty dance room, I expected a sincerity to emerge once the plot got going. But the show is almost relentlessly irreverent to the point that it starts to get a bit monotonous, which is surprising and even impressive, given the sheer amount of tomfoolery packed into every minute. By the end of the third episode, the arguing gets boring. Everyone is always yelling at each other. A certain amount of endearment is needed to gel it together, and raise the risk of it all going wrong. It’s hard to like any of the characters when they’re too busy being caricatures.

The slapstick is often great. Posh professionals misbehaving, suddenly sprinting away from a party, and manhandling each other down corridors is funny when played utterly deadpan. There is an absurdism that at times veers towards the surreal, such as when the head of the New York company tries to find Mr Shamblee in a restaurant, only to be confronted by customer after customer with Shamblee’s face. It is revealed not to be a stress-dream, but that Shamblee has commissioned sophisticated prosthetics to protect his security as an infamous man in public. It’s a good representation of how it feels to watch the show. The show is grounded in reality visually and contextually, and is simultaneously completely unreal.

As you move into the second half, sincerity dribbles in to give much-needed relief from the silliness. It is all the more effective because by this point, you will take any crumbs of wholesomeness. The cataclysmic relationships between the huge personalities of Tobias, Gabin, and Cheyenne give way to understanding and warmth, bonded by their unassailable love of ballet. While sparks fly between them, other flames are slowly fanned out as Nicolas contemplates a life without ballet, and his colleagues rail against the thought of ballet without him.

In Étoile, the melodrama of ballet seeps into everything around it. The performances on and off stage are bold and ridiculous and sincere. By the end, you are held in its thrall, holding your breath as the curtain rises. You just have to grit your teeth through the second and third episodes.