Near the start of the fifth episode of “Étoile,” a highly enjoyable series premiering Thursday on Prime Video, Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater, stands outside New York’s Film Forum, waiting for Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), general director of Le Ballet National in Paris. The marquee reads “Frederick Wiseman’s Ballet & La Danse,” two real-world documentaries on the dance world by our greatest documentarian; the first, from 1995, looks at the American Ballet Theater and the second, from 2009, the Paris Opera Ballet, actual institutions whose shadows are cast on the wall of this comedy — with a dramatic turn or two — from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino.
The Wiseman reference betokens a certain seriousness on the part of the creators, an awareness that people might be watching who know a thing or two about the subject. (And documentary film.) Sherman-Palladino, who studied dance from a young age, is already well known to fans as the woman behind “Gilmore Girls,” “Bunheads” — which also had a dance theme — and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which share with “Étoile” an innate theatricality; an interest in performance (apart from “Gilmore”); and the verbal rhythms of prewar screwball comedy.
There are scenes whose dialogue, with a little adjustment, could have served Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, or Carole Lombard and John Barrymore; it’s the world as once scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur or Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, if not quite to that level, and the combination of theatrical speech and location shooting — in and around New York’s Lincoln Center and the Palais Garnier and Salle Favart in Paris — makes for something interesting. Artificial in a way that paradoxically allows for something real and relatable, it’s also, for all its air of sophistication, corny, sentimental, sweet and sexual without being exactly sexy — all these people really care about is their work.
Yanic Truesdale as Raphael, left, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Geneviève, the director of Le Ballet National. (Philippe Antonello / Prime)
Luke Kirby stars as Jack, the head of Metropolitan Ballet Theater. (Philippe Antonello / Prime)
Setting the series in motion is a proposal from Geneviève that, in order to combat their mutual afflictions — aging audiences, slow ticket sales post-pandemic and creeping cultural irrelevancy — her company and Jack’s would agree to swap some top talent, generating publicity and excitement on both sides of the Atlantic. The bill for whatever this costs will be picked up by Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), a wealthy balletomane whom Jack regards as “the devil” and whose exaggerated posh delivery belies the fact that he’s an arms manufacturer (and delivered the eulogy at Rush Limbaugh’s funeral); friend and/or foe, he will come in and out of the action as an unaccountable comical wild card.
Swapped to Paris is Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), the daughter of the French cultural minister; having been cut from the French troupe’s ballet school, she’s become a featured soloist in New York and is now being repatriated, much to her displeasure — and that of the jumped-over ballerinas who regard her as a “nepo baby,” even if they can’t properly pronounce it. Also traded is Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick, a “Maisel” vet), a choreographer we are asked to accept as a groundbreaking genius, and whose thorough eccentricity Glick plays quietly and quizzically, as if the world around him, to the limited degree he understands it, is out of joint. Also appearing are a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are not the only characters to quickly disappear once a minor point has been made.
Heading west to Manhattan is Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), the Paris company’s star ballerina — its “étoile” — who earlier had made a splash as a guest artist in New York. (She, like Geneviève, has some old sub-romantic business with Jack.) We first meet her in a stormy sea as an ecowarrior, attacking a ship fishing illegally, then getting arrested herself. Cheyenne’s intensity, often indistinguishable from rage, can border on the comic, but de Laâge delivers an all-in, all-out performance; she sits and stands and walks like a dancer (though she also has a double for the dances) and makes you believe she’s who the show says she is. Whether actual star ballerinas are this serious and demanding and socially brutal, I don’t know, but this is a television show.
Cheyenne (Lou de Laage) is the étoile at the center of the exchange between dance companies.
(Philippe Antonello / Prime)
“Étoile” is not long on plot, in the sense that it is heading toward some obvious, definable goal — it has rivulets of plot, rather, involving different characters in different situations and settings, working out problems that have nothing necessarily to do with the series’ Big Idea, as the show moves toward its first-season irresolution. (New plotlines spark up near the end, making a second season a given.)
In an eight-episode series, such sidetracks can hardly be avoided, but it’s a show in any case more enjoyable in its details and performances than in the fate of the companies, or the future of dance. These plots and subplots and miniplots involving dancers and assistants, technicians and politicians, are not all equally rewarding — best of all is the relationship between Mishi and Cheyenne’s intimidating mother, Bruna (Marie Berto), who hammers on things, and with whom Mishi finds herself lodged — but together they create an attractive tapestry.
Kirby, whom I first noticed in the great Canadian series “Slings & Arrows,” a Shakespeare-themed backstage comedy not unlike “Étoile,” and who played a convincing Lenny Bruce in “Maisel,” rockets between nervous energy and being a nervous wreck as Jack; his flying up and down stairs is a motif here. Gainsbourg, in simply accessorized ninja black, is the picture of a woman who knows and means business.
David Haig claims a fair share of the show’s comedy lines as Jack’s closest friend, Nicholas Leutwylek, a former choreographer and dancer who now gets around on an electric scooter, though he remembers the good old days of cocaine and Quaaludes and when, as a guest artist at Stuttgart, hard-partying Germans “gave me so many petrochemicals I was technically a car for most of that season.” (Sleep aids seem to be the drug of choice for young and old here.)
Kelly Bishop, from “Gilmore” and “Bunheads,” plays Jack’s mother. David Byrne makes a funny appearance as David Byrne; choreographer Mark Morris and no doubt other real-world dance world figures I couldn’t identify lend authenticity. The dancers are good, naturally, even if the dances can sometimes feel less exciting than we’re meant to find them. More interesting is the placing of bodies in space when nobody’s dancing, lending a choreographic energy to ordinary conversations.
Those Wiseman films are streaming on Kanopy, by the way, accessible to anyone with a library card (they’re free, and you should have one). They’ll take you right into that rarefied world, without the extra comedy but with plenty of inherent drama. I can’t recommend them enough.
