Even though the first association when someone mentions ballet are beautiful, dainty girls in tutus, ballet is certainly not for the faint of heart and body. The years and sheer strenght one needs to seem so efforlessly graceful are extremely hard and unforgivable. One wrong move, one bad jump, one injury too many and a ballerina could become stuck at the sidelines, watching all those months of practicing go to waste, unable to dance ever again. The stakes, training and competition are so grueling and cruel that comparing it to professional assassination isn’t so far fetched. And who would believe that something so hauntingly beautiful could possible be heart-breaking.
The story is about Anna (Christine Perkins) an already aging ballerina, who doubles as a hit man for the director of the troop. When she gets a new understudy Grace (Emelia Perkins) she doesn’t suspect for a minute that she’s been betrayed. But much as in a ballet, she’s lead into a trap that almost costs her her life. She barely escapes and exacts her revenge during the last act of the show.
The motives of betrayal, revenge, subterfuge are quite common in the theater world, both in operas and ballets. The movie successfully borrows exactly the things that people love about these overly dramatic genres. This model has already been proven good time and again by numerous great films, most recently in the Oscar awared „Black Swan“. The world of these beautiful creatures and their extraordinary lives is something ordinary people seem to crave to understand. The more extraordinary it is, the better. Ballerina turned hitman is as extraordinary as it can possibly get.
The storyline of a hit man ballerina is nicely wrapped around the storyline that is unfolding on the stage and the few cliches (the evil Russian director of the troop) can be forgiven. The action scenes could have been practiced more, and the marks could have been a bit less caricatures of mobsters. The struggles in the backrooms of the theater are a little stiff and cartoonish, but sort of plausable. Dialog is sometimes overly dramatic, especilly the inner monologue, but it somehow fits well with the overly dramatic setting of the theater. The audience wants to know how extraordinary these theater poeple are, so they are willing to believe that their lives away from the stage is just as dramatic as the shows that they take part in. The effort of all the ballerinas hired to give more credibility and atmosphere of the movie is applaudable. All in all “Bullets and ballet” offers as an entertaining fictional view of a ballet troop, that given the amount of competition and physicality of the art, might not be too far from the truth. If you are ready to overlook the few flaws and the low budget of the movie production, you are in for an exciting ride through the lives and minds of point shoes, theater, classical music and ofcourse dramatic story worthy of the stage.