Birds of Paradise (2021)
Directed by Sarah Adina Smith
Two dancers at an elite ballet academy in Paris must compete for a contract to join the highly coveted Opéra National de Paris as they confront their competitive nature, sexual awakenings and how far they would go to win.
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What critics compared Birds of Paradise to
Before you can say “Black Swan,” Smith summons equally close comparisons to another dance-centric flick: Her visuals telegraph a dark-hued environment akin to that of “Suspiria” (the distressingly dusky one by Luca Gudagnino, rather than Dario Argento’s crimson-soaked classic).
What director Sarah Adina Smith ( Buster’s Mal Heart ) offers us instead is more akin to a high school production of Black Swan .
It’s not as troubling as “Black Swan,” or as operatically violent as “Suspiria” or even as desperately tragic as “The Red Shoes” though it gestures at those themes.
This film from writer-director Sarah Adina Smith, adapted from A.K. Small’s 2019 novel Bright Burning Stars , combines the cut-throat feminine energy of Thoroughbreds with the fiery competitiveness of Whiplash and Black Swan.
Birds of Paradise may have the DNA of Black Swan inside it, but it’s entirely unique in its narrative approach, telling a story about two teenage women, competing for a top prize at a Parisian ballet school.
With elements of “Black Swan,” “Suspiria” and even “Flashdance,” Amazon’s “Birds of Paradise” tells the story of two young American ballet dancers at a prestigious academy in Paris involved in a competition that will decide who gets a contract with the world-renowned Paris Opera Ballet (aka Opera National de Paris).
Aesthetically — perhaps more indebted to Nicholas Winding Refn’s provocative style in The Neon Demon than Aronofsky’s more somber and grounded formalism in Black Swan — Adina Smith, through the lucid cinematography of her DP Shaheen Seth, renders Birds of Paradise into a very phat piece of artwork, as if its visuals were ripped right out of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar editorials or something like fashion campaign commercials; and here, when they’re combined with the minimalistic white walls of the spacious, brightly-lit dance studio, the warm atmosphere of the two leads’ shared dorm-room, or in the surreal, floral dream sequences, all set to the ambient electronic score (composed by Ellen Reid), the impression isn’t far removed from the mysterious vibes one can also find in Dario Argento’s Suspiria or Phenomena — the magnificent appearance of Jacqueline Bisset in the role of the assertive, “devilish” instructress Madame Brunelleschi certainly adds more to this similarity.