Review: In the subgenre of bleak ballet, 'Birds of Paradise' takes a hopeful turn

Films that portray the brutality behind the beauty of ballet have become a subgenre. From the Archers’ romantic and tragic melodrama “The Red Shoes” to Dario Argento’s gleefully witchy giallo splatterfest “Suspiria” and Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller “Black Swan,” the backstage barbarism of ballet provides a fertile landscape to explore the darker parts of femininity.

Based on the young adult book “Bright Burning Stars” by A.K. Small, “Birds of Paradise” follows two aspiring ballerinas as they fight for the top prize at a Paris ballet school. Kate and Marine are both Americans in Paris, but they couldn’t be more different. Kate, hailing from Virginia, is a scholarship student and an inelegant outsider, while Marine, the daughter of the American ambassador, has been training for this honor her entire life.

The world that Smith spins, in collaboration with longtime cinematographer Shaheen Seth, choreographer Celia Rowson-Hall and composer Ellen Reid, is a modernist fantasy of the imagined ideal of a cutthroat French ballet school where drugs flow easily and the line between dance and sex is frequently blurred. It portrays ballet as a competitive, catty, bloody and superstitious art form, though it’s been heightened and twisted into a soapy teen melodrama of secrets, scheming and sabotage.

Though Kate and Marine start out as brawling ballerinas, they quickly become inextricably intertwined besties. Marine, mourning Ollie’s loss, needs a twin, and she quickly replaces her brother with Kate. They take an oath to win the prize together, but it becomes apparent that both cannot occupy the same top spot: While Kate becomes subsumed into the strict system enforced by their teacher Madame Brunelle , Marine has no choice but to break with it entirely.

Despite the drugs, glamour, death and twincest, there’s something about the seemingly sordid “Birds of Paradise” that feels sanded down and sanitized. It’s titillation for a young adult audience, the emotional beats easy to digest. It’s not as troubling as “

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