Review: Birds of Paradise (Prime, 2021)
Written and directed by Sarah Adina Smith, Birds of Paradise is a seductive YA drama about entering into a strange new world to become the best ballet dancer. Set both on the stage of the Paris Opera Ballet School and in a surreal nightclub/dance space called Jungle, the film has beautiful colors and stark, moody atmospheres that set it inside the canon of movies like Black Swan or Suspiria.
Kate (Diana Silvers), an American ballet student who has been given a brand new scholarship to the Paris Opera Ballet, is tasked with beating out all the other female students to be part of the cast. Surrounded by the French youth elite and unable to speak any French, she quickly learns that not only did she accidentally receive the dead-brother-of-the-meanest-girl-in-school scholarship to attend, but also it does not cover expenses. Just the school and a shared room (which just so happens to be with said mean girl queen, Marine).
After a difficult first day, Kate finds herself not only rooming with Marine (Kristine Froseth), but having to share the same bed due to the size of the house where all the ballerinas live. As a challenge, Marine takes Kate to the hidden, exotically neon dance club, Jungle. But, in order to win the respect of Marine and her onlooking peers, she must swallow a (drugged) worm and compete in a dance-off. Whoever stops first, drops out of the school. As they collapse into a glittery, luminescent, Suspiria-esque frenzy, both Marine and Kate quickly realize they can’t maintain more than a few minutes of sustained, extremely zonked dancing and agree to stop together.
Back home, thanks to drugs and the power of dancing, they become fast friends and agree to make a pact. They will be the first female/female winners of the competition, which is meant to produce a male/female pair.
Birds of Paradise is a young adult drama in the style of many popular series at the moment. It has a highly charged, sexually active school, where all genders are living down the hall from each other. It has competition and an underdog protagonist, it has mean girls who become friends, and it has an evil (mother-type) headmaster. But where the film succeeds most is in its look. Playing with very stark contrasts - the performance room, where they all audition and practice, is blindingly bright, while the waiting area, where they all watch and prepare for their names to be called, is dark and moody - the cinematography does a lot of work to separate the modes of reality. Where it is dark, things are real and catty. Where it is light, performance is expected at a high standard. Clean movement, watchful eyes. Many moments in the film are surreal - in the first shot, before the movie really starts, there is a glittery, ethereal dancer in a dark forest, wearing a silver bird mask, which will come back many times as an echo of the drugged out jungle club night.
This choice, to play with what is and is not real, elevated the film from a pretty typical mean girl plot, to something with a bit more feeling and interest. There are class disparities between Kate and the rest of the students, which is used to strengthen the relationship between Kate and Marine (who is the daughter of the French Ambassador to the United States), but it feels thought through. Though, it is still part of what makes Kate the underdog (along with her American-style of ballet, which is described as rigid and lacking grace).
By the end, the film rushes to tie up the disparities between its choices, perhaps spending too little time on its final sequence and allowing it to devolve into a spoken mythology or folk story instead of letting the story naturally progress into abstraction as a metaphor.
Birds of Paradise is toned-down Suspiria and more-often-weird Black Swan. It is a fine film to add to the sexy, strange ballet canon.