Grand Jeté

GRAND JETÉ   **1/2

Isabelle Stever

2022

IDEA:  A former ballerina, now working as a dance instructor, engages in an affair with her estranged adult son.

BLURB:  In Grand Jeté, motherhood is a sadomasochistic ritual as precious as it is perverse. When we’re first introduced to Nadja (Sarah Grether), however, it’s not in the context of maternity but the vocation she long ago substituted for her role as a mother. Instead of rearing a child, Nadja received her licks as a ballerina, pushing the limits of her body through an art at once graceful and unforgivingly grueling until her body could take it no more. Constantin Campean’s camera cleaves to Nadja’s undulating bones and scarred skin in closeups so tight they become synecdochic of a woman’s crumbling midlife prospects. This sense of loss drives her to engage in an emphatically Oedipal relationship with her estranged son, through which she finds a figurative and literal second chance at motherhood. It’s not exactly clear, in this largely withholding film, what’s driving the son (besides an evident shared affinity for bodily punishment and drinking from the sink faucet), but then this isn’t really the story of his desire. While it often plays like a leaden Piano Teacher-like erotic provocation, Grand Jeté becomes, in its final moments, the dementedly poignant fable of a mother’s (re)birth.