The Company

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 2003, 112 min
Section: Dance for the Camera

Synopsis

In his latest work, renowned director Robert Altman teams up with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and actors Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell to paint a fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait of a top ballet company. It’s a film about the creative process, the conflict between the personal and the professional, and the ups and downs of performing. Altman captures the lives of the young dancers in all their ironic contradictions.  Although world-class artists, they are, for the most part, poorly paid and live hand-to-mouth, often in very unglamorous conditions. They take immaculate care of their bodies while smoking countless cigarettes, downing endless cups of coffee and working punishing hours.  Their daily reality includes bloody feet, bludgeoned ambitions and participation in dance pieces of demanding beauty. McDowell turns in a tour de force performance as the company’s autocratic artistic director. Campbell, who trained with the National Ballet of Canada before turning to acting, plays a gifted but conflicted member of the corps who is on the verge of becoming a principal dancer. She developed the story with screenwriter Barbara Turner and served as one of the film’s producers.

“On a daily basis and in the most impossible and dramatic terms, dancers face what we all face: biological clocks and the force of gravity telling us NO. Yet for some part of their working lives dancers literally prevail over those forces.” – Robert Altman
 

About the director

Robert Altman (b. 1925, Kansas City, Missouri) is a key figure in the renaissance of American filmmaking in the seventies. After directing numerous television episodes, the feature M*A*S*H (1970) established his reputation as an actor’s director who used sound in an innovative way, and earned him the first of five Academy Award directing nominations. Selected filmography: Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), Three Women (1977), Vincent and Theo (1990), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Prêt-à-porter (1994), The Gingerbread Man (1998), Cookie’s Fortune (1999), Dr. T. and the Women (2000) and Gosford Park (2001).