Birds of Paradise (2021)
Review of Birds of Paradise (2021), directed by Sarah Adina Smith
I’d never heard of this film before randomly stumbling upon it on Amazon. I’ve been leeching on my mother’s Amazon Prime account lately since I know she’s going to be cancelling it, so it’s time to watch all of the Amazon-exclusive content in HD while I still have the chance. I didn’t watch the trailer or read the synopsis of this movie before pressing play; not too sure why I jumped straight into this one, but, at the end of the day, it was an interesting watch to sit and break down after the fact.
What drew me into this movie were two things specifically: it was set in a prestigious ballet academy in Paris and the fact that it was called Birds of Paradise. The ballet industry in general tends to interest me as someone who went to an arts high school with an intense ballet program. While ballet tends to be beautiful to watch, it can also destroy someone’s body and mind. Anorexia is a major problem in the ballet world. With that pre-existing knowledge, I went into the first half of this movie with a hunch, and I turned out to be completely and utterly correct.
Let’s begin this review.
At a prestigious competitive ballet school in Paris, people will do anything to get to the top.
Kate Sanders, who seems to have won every single competition back home in the United States, has just arrived to one of the best ballet schools in the world. She doesn’t speak French, is on a scholarship as she’s from a working class background, and shows up in a blue tutu on the first day. Needless to say, she sticks out like a sore thumb immediately compared to the other students. This shows in her performances, as during her first evaluations and rankings, she’s ranked at the very bottom of the list.
The second part of this problem is the fact that right before going in, she got into a fight with the only other American girl there, Marine. Marine is the daughter of the American Ambassador to French and is enraged when Kate says she hears about the boy that killed himself by jumping off of a bridge.
It turns out that this is Marine’s twin brother, or, as another student says, the other half of her soul. And so when Kate says that he jumped off of a bridge in front of Marine, she flies into a rage and tries to fight Kate, leaving them both bruised and disheveled. The plot thickens when Kate discovers that Marine’s parents fund her scholarship.
The two girls actually become friends, but Kate is beginning to succumb to the effects of intensive ballet. She starts doing drugs and having sex with the top male dancer at the school. Marine, on the other hand, seems unhappy with the world of ballet and seems to want to defy the expectations imposed upon her but seems unable to actually do so. But when Kate’s scholarship is revoked by Marine’s parents, she commits the ultimate sin and will then brutally claw her way to the top spot to win prize money to continue providing for herself and her family.
I found the title to be interesting in comparison to the socioeconomic themes going on throughout this movie. On the superficial visual level, ballet seems like it is full of birds of paradise. But both of our main characters are struggling in this world personally and professionally, leading to both of them making some pretty damaging decisions.
That’s why I find the scene where they dance masked, take them off, and engage in a threesome with the male dancer to be so powerful. It was like a stripping of what tethers them to this world of ballet and hardship, then being able to lose themselves in some sort of passion—one that they once had for ballet and have now lost.
Kate also is a mirror to Ollie, Marine’s lost twin brother. Ollie and Marine once had a pact to always be together, but when that fails and he turns to drugs, he kills himself on the bridge. Kate turns to drugs and also makes a pact with Marine. This pact, too, is broken disastrously, but instead of someone resorting to death, Marine rediscovers her purpose in being alive.
She does an avant-garde ballet dance, much to the horror of everyone watching, and slams her palms to the ground. This is her redemption. But, at the same time, I find it so interesting that Kate spreads a rumor that Ollie and Marine had sex when Kate herself is the mirror to Ollie. Kate and Marine did indeed have sex, but Ollie and Marine didn’t.
Kate, too, gets her happy ending, but it comes at a price. I found this particularly profound too because she seems to be the only working class girl in this group of dancers. Her father gave up their house so she could be there, and she doesn’t even have nice ballet shoes. Yet she still comes out on top, but with a major price. We see this in the final scenes of the movie, on in which Kate professes at how Marine should hate her for what she’s done. But Marine is unable to hate her because of how she lit the path for her, showing how one is at peace but the other is tumultuous still.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an interesting movie that tends to give you a lot of food for thought. It’s not obvious food for thought, but instead something that you need to dig deeper into the imagery and connections between the characters for. The movie has the struggles of the ballet world along with the socioeconomic problems involving what it takes to get to the certain point of success within the arts. I think the movie also teaches something about letting go and moving forward, which is particularly powerful. There’s also some stunning, stark images scattered throughout, as well as beautiful performance. Will definitely look out for both of these ladies in the future!
