Le Rendez-vous / Le Loup / Le Jeune homme et la mort
Choreography: Roland Petit
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier
September 25, 2010

Essentially French: perhaps the first words that come to mind when the curtain raises on a recreation of the black and white Paris so often seen on French postcards, the setting for Le Rendez-vous. But far from being just a nostalgic trip back in time, the Roland Petit triple bill with which the Paris Opera Ballet opened its 2010-11 season brings back the collaborative spirit of a seminal, arguably glorious era. Picasso, Prévert, Brassaï, Cocteau, Jean Anouilh all contributed something to the works on offer, a curtain here, a wonderfully Surrealist plotline there. The perfume and myths of old France emerge naturally from these ingredients; while the neo-classical choreography may not always speak of genius, Petit was undeniably a product of the artistic milieu these artists belonged to, and he channelled the delicate metaphors they devised for him in the 1940s and 1950s into rich, intelligent works.

Le Rendez-vous and Le jeune homme et la mort have much in common, and are both firmly rooted in French culture. Neither of their heroes has a name: they are jeunes hommes (young men), and a type often encountered in 19th and early 20th-century French literature – the moody young man who has come to Paris to make a fortune or to become an artist, and who gets lost on the way, sidetracked by melancholy or the absurdity of life. The smoking hero of Le jeune homme et la mort, who lives in a garret in Paris and has Picasso prints looming over his bed, evokes Baudelaire’s anguished melancholy or Louis Aragon’s Aurélien, caught in the strange inter-war atmosphere, doomed to love a woman whose face reminds him of a death mask. In Le rendez-vous, the hero plays a dangerous game with Fate while two innocent children dance to Jacques Prévert’s nostalgic Les enfants qui s’aiment. In 25 minutes, Petit captures the world Marcel Carné and Prévert created together on film (at once lyrical and unsentimental, eerie and tragic) much better than José Martinez’ recent re-creation of their masterpiece, Les Enfants du paradis. Both jeunes hommes encounter Death in the end, whose personification is striking in each case: a woman, of course, with two versions of the femme fatale, as ambiguous as any Surrealist figures. What we see are two modern enactments of Le spleen de Paris, in a sense, as Baudelaire had so aptly titled one of his volumes of poems – a life-or-death mental struggle against a background of Brassaï photos or Citroën lights. (…)

» Read the full review in Ballet.co Magazine

Nicolas Le Riche & Hugo Vigliotti in Le Rendez-vous © Anne Deniau