ADFF 2011 Review: Pina

Let’s just say this – ‘Pina’ will forever be remembered as the best pure dance movie ever made. It has the best use of 3-D that a dance movie has ever done, and its mesmerizing and highly graceful dance sequences are bound to enchant audiences worldwide who don’t mind an absolute lack of plot or structure.

The film is a grand tribute to modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch, where her students perform her work in the most epic fashion possible in elaborate dance sequences. And that’s all it is. There’s hardly any words in the film, which is strange considering it’s a documentary. The dance does the talking and nothing else. There’s no story, no structure of any sort. Just dance sequence and a few seconds of a performer’s face and a few words, before cutting to another dance sequence. It’s a filmmaking style not everyone will appreciate, and I certainly would have liked a basic structure to the film when it started weighing down on me, which it does at a certain point.

But for those looking for what it has to offer, ‘Pina’ is simply breathtaking. The dance sequences are all real without any grand choreography and there is a raw emotion to each of them that is sometimes spine-tingling to watch. Each of the pieces have an underlying theme to them and are bursting with extreme emotional power even without saying a word. Most of the dances are filmed inside, but some of them are filmed at gorgeous outdoor locales. For any fan of dance, this is hands-on the best dance that will ever be captured on film. It’s graceful, exquisite and there’s nothing quite like this.

And the 3-D is used to great effect here. Instead of going the ‘jumping out to your face’ route that pretty much every 3-D movie does, here the extra dimension is used to pull you inside the scene and set up the background and foreground to maximize the power of the dance and the immersive experience itself. It’s the artistic use of 3D like the way it’s done here that can actually save the format from dying out, and this is clearly the best way to see the film if possible.

‘Pina’ is must-see for anyone who enjoys dance. It’s beautiful and breathtaking in technique, even though it lacks any sort of structure which mars the experience a little bit.

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