Daughter of Bacchus

Isadora drank too much, she couldn't keep her hands off good-looking young men, couldn't bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money. But a great sense of health filled the hall when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of the stage, She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer.

John Dos Passos, in U.S.A.

Her youth was fin de siecle; her philosophy was fin du monde. She was an earthly personification of Emily Dickinson's inebriate of air and debauchee of dew, stoned on life and art. In answer to the question, "What gods has mankind worshipped?" Dancer Isadora Duncan once replied: "Dionysus -- yesterday. Christ -- today. After tomorrow, Bacchus at last!" In short she was the quintessential bohemian, the ideal subject for a screen biography. The Loves of Isadora supplies the ideal object: Vanessa Redgrave, whose enactment of Duncan carries with it an exquisite sensitivity and a formidable intelligence.

That intelligence can seldom shine through the film. Director Karel Reisz (Morgan!) has found an appropriately Proustian mode in which to tell the story, pouring time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario --radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes --is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen.

Macabre Accident. As a child in San Francisco, Isadora burned her parents' marriage certificate to free herself from moral convention. She yielded to the tyranny of official paper only once thereafter -- when she married her Rus sian lover in order to bring him into the U.S. Between those parentheses, she ransacked the temples of Hellenic culture, switched from dresses to togas and from shoes to scandals. In Amer ica, the bourgeois dismissed her as a wan ton. It was in Europe that she won her recognition -- and lost her life when her trailing scarf wound around a racing-car wheel. Her last words seem written in art-nouveau script: "Adieu, mes amis, je vais `a la gloire."

Duncan's first love affair was with Stage Designer Gordon Craig, whose electric presence is dimmed in the film to about 40 watts by James Fox. Her most celebrated amour was Paris Singer (Jason Robards), the sewing-machine heir. Singer's idea of a bauble was a ten-diamond pendant; Robards' idea of acting is to bark his love scenes tersely, as if ordering a gross of No. 11 needles. Isadora had a child by each of her lovers; both children died in an absurd and macabre automobile accident in France. From then on, it was a long bouree downhill. "I love potatoes and young men," she sighed, "that's my trouble!" Calories and sycophants attended her decline. Choreographer George Balanchine recalled her Russian dance recital in 1921: "Absolutely unbelievable --a drunken, fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig."

Like Tigairs. It is in those wasted, final years that Redgrave gives the film its ironic dimension. Isadora, in a flutter of unpaid bills and lisping parasites, refuses to give way to age. Her hair is dyed a defiant red, her face is a map of cracks and hollows--but the body still rages against the dying of the light. Although thin herself, Redgrave miraculously conveys grossness. As she writhes and leaps in Duncan's unique free-foot choreography, the actress further illuminates Isadora as a reconciliation of opposites--a naive sophisticate, a Continental hick, a selfless egotist who, Agnes de Mille recalls, "cleared away the rubbish. Isadora was a gigantic broom."

The film could have used that broom --most notably in the cluttered depiction of Isadora's marriage to Russian Poet Sergei Essenin. To portray the epileptic genius at high pitch, Yugoslav Actor Ivan Tchenko is called upon to leap bedward at Isadora and roar, "Ve make lawv like tigairs!" With that kind of dialogue, and no one to act against--or for--Redgrave cannot help turning the picture into a gigantic one-woman show. So, of course, was Isadora Duncan --but even she had help.

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