Famously exacting in the physical endurance, uniformity and precision it requires from its dancers, ballet has served as the heightened dramatic backdrop to many a film – Black Swan, Billy Elliot, Suspiria, The Red Shoes.
The latest addition to this oeuvre, Neneh Superstar, asks what would happen if a young, working-class Black girl were to attempt to break into the whitewashed and, by extension, white supremacist, world of ballet.
Neneh-Fanta Gnaoré (Oumy Bruni Garrel) is a 12-year-old French girl completely and unabashedly herself: a virtuously talented dancer as comfortable freestyling in the streets to hip-hop as she is performing a pirouette in the formal setting of a ballet school. She’s cheeky, impudent, brash and confident.
When she’s accepted into the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet School, she comes up against the racism of gatekeepers, hell bent on “guaranteeing the tradition” of the artform, which is another way of saying they’re committed to preserving its whiteness.
In one particularly eye-opening sequence where the judges are debating whether to admit Neneh into their school, the racism on display ranges from veiled statements (“we need an aesthetic uniformity”) to full-blown eugenics-informed vitriol that calls into question the Black body and the “risk” of Neneh developing hips and breasts in adolescence.
The racism depicted is so blatant it can seem cartoonish, but such are the race relations in an artform decried for lagging behind the rest of the world. The Paris Opera Ballet School specifically has been called out for staging dancers in blackface as recently as 2015, and French Black ballet dancer Chloé Lopes Gomes’s experience at Berlin’s principal dance company mirrors the racism Neneh faces in the film.
Neneh’s Blackness is seen as a distraction in a sea of whiteness, a weakness that renders her incapable of amounting to anything more than an understudy, an aberration.
This racism finds its apotheosis in Marianne Belage (Maïwenn), the ballet company’s matriarch who goes out of her way to denigrate Neneh by belittling her or straight-out ignoring her. Neneh’s trials and tribulations unfold in tandem with Marianne’s, as the latter grapples with her own tortured entry into the ballet world and the way she was also regarded as an outsider.
That a 12-year-old has to shoulder all these malignant, unspoken prejudices while also being bullied by the other girls and without the support of her parents – the dancing company operates akin to a boarding school – is difficult to watch.
Pressures mount on Neneh from every direction: the pressure to be small, which is something all the girls face, though only Neneh’s “morphology” is called into question by practitioners who regard her like an exotic exhibit; the pressure to obtain additional private tutoring on top of five days of rigorous training.
It’s a credit to the film’s nuanced portrayal that Neneh is painted as an anomaly in the ballet scene for reasons that extend beyond her race. Insolent and quick to anger, she’s a disruptive force in rehearsals because she’s inquisitive and stands up for herself – qualities not appreciated in a setting that values conformity and obsequiousness above all else.
Writer and director Ramzi Ben Sliman imbues the film with enough light-heartedness and joy that things never truly feel hopeless and bleak. The warm saturation of scenes capturing Neneh mirthfully dancing through a ballet shop, and the contentment she derives from belonging to a loving community — memorably captured in a hair salon in one scene — stands in stark contrast to the cool-tinged scenes in the ballet school, where almost everyone is seen as a threat.
Men surprisingly emerge as the biggest champions of Neneh. Her father, played by Steve Tientcheu in an exceedingly heartfelt performance, counters the (to be fair, extremely valid) concerns of her mother (Aïssa Maïga), who struggles to see the viability and feasibility of her daughter becoming a dancer.
In one particularly moving scene towards the end of the movie, he expertly distils Neneh’s discomfort in her own skin with resounding lines like: “You’re not sick of being Black, you’re sick of how Blacks are treated in France.”
The amiable Jean-Claude Kahane (Cédric Kahn) is Neneh’s main cheerleader within the institutionalised setting – though his ability to supersede the wishes of Marianne, the supposed headmistress of the school, is laughable at times.
If at times reductive and fairytale-like in its swift resolution of deeply entrenched attitudes, Neneh Superstar is perfect for the audience it’s intended for – children the same age as Neneh, daring to imagine a reality that seems all but impossible for them.
Neneh Superstar is showing now in selected cinemas.