ISADORA 1968 TV
If Redgrave isn’t really solid enough, fleshy enough for Isadora (Vivian Pickles playing the role in Ken Russell’s TV biography was almost ideal) if at times she prances when she should move with enormous authority, it doesn’t really matter-she is illuminated from within by the same incandescence that must have marked Isadora. It also minces no words in its portrait of her last years, when she had become redundant, erratic, impossible-and haunted. “Isadora” (which contains brief scenes of nudity) captures perfectly the artistic climate in which the dancer put into practice astonishing “ideals of art, maternity and personal liberty” with honesty and dedicated flamboyance. Some of Reisz’s dance images are phenomenal: the moonlit love scene on the floor of Craig’s studio where Isadora seems to be floating through the air in one of film’s most delicately erotic moments or the Russian theater sequence, as she holds aloft a lantern and the men of the audience sing for her. These men-plus Russian poet Sergei Essenin (Ivan Tchenko)-each have their weight in the film, but it is Isadora/Vanessa in her Grecian draperies who dominates it, free, ecstatic, tragic, dancing unbounded across corseted continents. With the film’s current structure, we understand how utterly her life broke apart when her two young children were drowned-the little daughter she had by scenic artist Edward Gordon Craig (James Fox), her even younger son whose father was the “monstrously rich " sewing-machine heir, Paris Singer (Jason Robards). She was by this time blowzy and alcoholic but far from old-when she died in a grotesque car accident, strangled by her own chiffon scarf, she was only 49.
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