I like to approach movies with as much of a blank slate as possible. This way, I’m not viewing something having already placed expectations about what it’ll be on it. In general, this approach works for me. However, now and then, I wish I had more information on a film to prepare myself. Grand Jeté from director Isabelle Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova is one such film because of the prominently featured incest storyline.
Incest in narrative storytelling has been around for a long time, it’s oedipal. The first time I saw it was a preteen at a party watching a VHS of Flowers in the Attic, where it was portrayed as tragically inevitable. More recently, much of the world watched as Cersei and Jamie Lannister’s destructive incestual relationship led many to lose their lives until they got crushed in the rubble in Game of Thrones. Grand Jeté uses its incest storyline to explore a broken woman who has grown to associate pain with pleasure/reward.
Nadja (played by Sarah Nevada Grether) was a professional ballet dancer, now a teacher, and we meet her doing what she must to get her body to handle the pain of getting through teaching a ballet class. She’s supposed to be using a cane, she doesn’t, and after the class, she increases her pain medication dosage. Even as her body suffers the results of the strain of ballet, she physically forces her dancers to push through pain, at one point even sitting on a girl’s shoulders to get her to achieve the extension she wants. The idea of forced perfection, damn the consequences down the line, as long as you achieve the correct image at the moment is a theme in the film. It’s driven home when she visits her mother, and the first thing she says is that she can help her with her pimples.
Mario (played by Emil von Schönfels) lays at the heart of this crafted image, both the result and at conflict. Conceived because Nadja’s birth control failed because she was throwing up, probably in an effort to maintain the perfect ballet body (we see her make her young students weigh in). After his birth, she did not raise him or spend time in his life, because that too would’ve ruined the perfect ballet image. In her absence, he’s also become a performer, one that utilizes endurance of pain to reap the reward of audience approval (and money). He has become a mirror of herself that’s one of the things that draws her to him.
The film doesn’t make Nadja and Mario look like the healthy choice. It is broken people doing broken things. It’s clear in the interactions with the Hanne (played by Susanne Bredehöft), Nadja’s mother and Mario’s grandmother, whom they both live with for a time while carrying out their relationship. Hanne never outright condemns it, possibly because she feels guilty both the children she raised are broken, but the quiet pain as she watches the two people she cares about the most in the world move about in that way speaks volumes.
Constantin Campean’s camera often found the feet, whether they were on the dance floor or in the bedroom. This will probably make as many viewers uncomfortable as the incest storyline as lots of people find feet gross. I found the focus on body parts, mostly feet, though back, shoulder, and neck muscles also got attention) worked well for a film that centred on a dancer. In dance, the body, especially the feet, are thought of as extensions. What better way to move through her world?
Grand Jeté premiered at Berlinale 2022 in the Panorama section.