Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

I hate ballet and loathe inspirational films. And I love this documentary! Just a wonderful treatise on not giving up and folding your tent after being dealt an extraordinarily bad hand. I especially admired how LeClercq was able to write about her affliction, while in the throes of it, with a minimum of self pity and generous amounts of perception and wry humor. If she hadn't chosen to reinvent herself as a teacher LeClercq could have been a first rate diarist. I also like how director Nancy Buirski was able to weave through LeClercq's struggles with polio her conflicts with Balanchine and Jerome Robbins so that it felt like a seamless whole and not different documentaries vying for the same space. In other words, like a ballet this is a most graceful work. A minus. (First fifteen minutes are kinda slow, in my opinion, or I'd give it a 10).