Ice-Dancing Goes to the Movies

As happens every two years, I find the Olympic Games irresistible viewing. Even though --  technophobe that I am -- I consider the many-buttoned remote control gadgets that power my TV extraordinarily daunting, I’m currently spending my evenings glued to the tube, enjoying the scope and the sweep of winter sports. Speaking of sweeping, I can’t say I’m keen on curling, but  watching snowboarding sports sure gets my blood racing. Heck, I even got excited recently during the finals of the single-man luge.

But for me the sport of sports is figure-skating. The blending of music, costumes, and dramatic emoting with first-class athleticism is for me too powerful to ignore. I’m a sucker for up-close-and-personal profiles of the skaters, and the one-two punch of Tara Lipinski and the always memorable Johnny Weir adds invaluable commentary. I learned from Weir, for instance, that in ice-dancing the woman’s role is to be the show-offy flower, while her male partner acts as her stem. Weir then went on to portray one of the teams, admiringly, as containing two flowers. 

I think one of the things that intrigues me about figure-skating competitions is that they meld artful discipline with the spontaneity of live competition. When you watch a movie, you’re enjoying the result of months and years of careful planning by a whole army of participants. Yes, it’s true that the unexpected things that pop up on a movie set can have impact on a completed film, for better or for worse. Serendipity is a very real aspect of the film-making process, and smart filmmakers know how to take advantage of happy accidents. Still, when we watch a film, we’re seeing a finished product, one that has been lovingly polished and perfected before it reaches audiences.  A live theatre performance can change slightly from evening to evening, depending on the mood of the audience, the health of the actors, and a host of other things. But normally theatre productions that are beyond the rehearsal stage try to conform nightly to a set of codified expectations toward which everyone has been aiming during weeks of preparation. 

In figure-skating, too, there is a carefully developed plan of attack for each stage of the competition. Costumes, music, and basic choreography don’t vary from outing to outing. But this is a sport, and so anything can happen. A bobble, a recovery, a fall . . . what develops in the dynamic between pairs skaters from night to night is particularly fraught. One Canadian ice-dancer, I’m told, is super-adept at calculating point totals in her head while she’s on the ice. If one of her and her partner’s elements doesn’t go as planned, she knows how to adjust for maximum impact. 

It doesn’t surprise me to sense that figure-skaters love movies. At least, they frequently turn to famous movie themes to add crowd-pleasing oomph to their programs. In the last few days, I’ve seen skaters glide to music from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Memoirs of a Geisha, and “Unchained Melody,” as featured in the schmaltzy lost-love movie, Ghost. The Italian duos seem particularly adept at taking advantage of movie drama through their choice of music. One pair of Italians charmingly captured the antic spirit of Fellini by way of Nino Rota’s film scores. And an Italian ice-dancing team, skating to music from Life is Beautiful, conveyed that Holocaust film’s heartbreaking throughline by moving from romantic love to the horrors of war. All the best skaters, at least in my eyes, tell a story with their faces and bodies. And movies are often the inspiration that moves them forward.

The Olympics Discover Movieland

I barely remember the opening ceremonies of the 1984 L.A. Olympics. I know they were staged by David Wolper, producer of such prize-winning TV events as Roots and The Thorn Birds. What I vaguely recall is dancers doing a hoedown and a score of pianists banging out “Rhapsody in Blue,” seated at white grand pianos, before Rafer Johnson mounted the steps of the L.A. Coliseum to ignite the Olympic torch. There wasn’t a cinematic projection in sight, but everyone griped that it was all too Hollywood.

Fast-forward to the 21st century. Opening ceremonies are now expected to be grand spectacles, geared as much to the worldwide TV audience as to ticket-holders inside the stadium. In Beijing, the 2008 Olympics kicked off with a breathtaking extravaganza directed by Zhang Yimou (whose masterful period films include Raise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers). This year, the opening event of the London Olympics was entrusted to Danny Boyle, best known for his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire but also responsible for directing Trainspotting and other gutsy indie films. Not only did Boyle use filmed images as a backdrop for the action on the stadium floor, but he also called on show biz personalities (including Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Craig) to add sparkle to the proceedings. Craig took part in the ceremonies’ single most remarkable segment, when -— in character as James Bond -- he appeared on film to escort 86-year-old Queen Elizabeth II to the ceremonies. They climbed into an official helicopter, and then (in a carefully edited sequence) seemed to parachute out over London and into the stadium. Obviously, movie magic made that happen.

The magic of movies was also featured in a comic sequence in which British comic Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean), bored with his one-note gig in a symphony orchestra, dreamed himself into a clip from Chariots of Fire. This 1981 film, remembered today mostly for its haunting score, details the story of two real-life track stars who competed for Britain at the 1924 Olympics. The film’s most iconic moment comes earlier, with the British team sprinting along a lonely beach, as inspirational music swells. Boyle seamlessly inserted Atkinson into the scene, jostling for position among the runners, then cheating by thumbing a ride to get ahead of the pack, finally elbowing a “teammate” to the ground so he could claim victory for himself.

One big difference between films and sporting events is that the drama inherent in athletic competitions doesn’t follow a pre-approved script. Some of history’s greatest filmmakers have used the spontaneity of sports as the raw material for brilliant documentaries. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, capturing the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was intended to glorify the rise of the Third Reich, but ended up as something of a paean to an African-American track star, Jesse Owens. Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad gave a human face to the 1964 games.

These days Chariots of Fire doesn’t win much respect, but I remember it fondly for taking me back to the era when an Olympic team was a gentleman’s club, one in which a runner who was Jewish or the son of Christian missionaries would not feel at home. Few other features use the Olympics as a backdrop, but one exception is Cary Grant’s last film, Walk, Don’t Run. Grant, at sixty-two, was no longer willing to be cast as a romantic lead. In Walk, Don’t Run, set during the Tokyo Olympics, he endearingly plays Cupid to Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton. This is the only film I know that spotlights race-walking, one of the goofiest-looking sports on the Olympic roster.