Powerful but lacking

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2010)

First the stuff I liked. Beautifully designed, photographed and acted. The movie is stylish and full of powerful images and intense emotions. Worth it just for that.
Stuff I was disappointed with. Easy stuff first. The sex was way too explicit. It was embarrassing and threw me out of the movie. I was aware of sitting in a theatre with a bunch of other people watching this stuff instead of staying with the story.
My main criticism is that a movie like this needs to be centred around the lead character's relationship with the people around her, but her relationship was mainly to the character in the ballet. What was her fear about? Why was she so afraid of exposing her inner self? What demons lived there? You never find out.
Her relationship with her mother should have been the bedrock of what troubled her, but their relationship was never exposed. What was the problem? Was it her mother's oppressive love, her mother's too high expectations? Could she only see herself through her mother's eyes? The movie does not explore their relationship at all.
The first scene where we see them together was completely wrong. Instead of a couple who have lived together for thirty years with a relationship set in stone, they seem to be flirting with each other like they are just getting to know each other. As a parent of older children myself, it all seemed false.
Her relationship with the ballet director, the man driving her out of her comfort zone was also way too lightly sketched out. He was driving her to the point of insanity yet you never got any idea of the level of emotion, whether love or hate, that could possible cause that. And his suggestion that she needed to experience an orgasm was just silly. Any 30 year old woman will have had one. He needed to draw her into a darker place in her psyche and show her that that place was a part of her too. He needed to be a lot more depraved.
This movie is good and worth seeing, but it could have been truly great, and it wasn't.