"One day in the streets of Paris, I pushed Diaghilev in order to show
   him that I was not afraid of him.  Diaghilev hit me with his stick,
   as I wanted to go away from him.  After this, we lived for a long
   time together."

That's from Vaslav Nijinsky's diary, so you'd thing that Paul Cox's
11-years-in-the-making "The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky" would be similarly
quirky and grand.  Unfortunately, even with a goodly amount of quirk, it's
not very good.  Derek Jacobi does a wonderful job narrating the diaries -
"I'll invent a better fountain pen.  I sell it for $5 million.  The pen
will be called god." - but a book-on-tape or a brief documentary would
make more sense.

Cox tells the story of Nijinsky's breakdown after World War II (he went on
to live another 30 years!) through the pages of the diary he kept before he
was forbidden to write "to save his sanity."

What makes this a movie? There's the rub: just some old photos,
fragmentary re-enactment of Nijinsky's dancing, and lots and lots of
landscapes and abstract images flashing around.

The diary itself is a sad affair.  Except for a few flashes of humor
and wit ("Stravinsky is a good composer, but he doesn't write about life"),
it's a crazy litany of dislikes (of red roses, meat, revolutions, and
self-abuse, which - he firmly believed - leads to one's hair falling out,
faun or not) and obsessive mantras.

For anyone who witnessed the elderly and unstable Kyra Nijinsky's visit
to the Oakland Ballet some 20 years ago, it's a shock to see photos of the
beautiful 6-year-old, the apple of her father's eye, even as his vision
blurred forever.

"Nijinsky" is shown at the SF International Film Festival on April 28 and
29, and goes into commercial US distribution this summer.

Janos Gereben/SF
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