Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq movie review (2014)

Tanaquil le Clercq was a muse and love interest of two of the last century's greatest American choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Born in Paris in 1929 and raised in privileged, sheltered circumstances in New York, Tanny, as her friends called her, started studying dance as a child and was at Balanchine's School of American Ballet when he discovered her. Though she was only 15, he cast her in lead roles and she quickly became a star, having never served in the corps de ballet.

Her skill as a dancer is evident in the clips director Nancy Buirski provides, but le Clercq was also helped, clearly, by her looks. Tall, svelte and long-legged at a time when most ballerinas were short, she exuded a coltish energy and cut a striking figure on stage. Her face also had a distinctive allure, a mixture of simplicity and understated ethereality, like a more angular Julie Harris with a bit of Lauren Bacall's youthful insouciance.

Already middle-aged when he met her, the Russian-born Balanchine had a history of depending creatively and emotionally on his prima ballerinas. He had married four of them before he met Tanny, and all had eventually left him (rather than the other way around) when it seemed their artistic partnership had run its course. With Tanny, the pattern repeated, but from the testimony of those who knew them, the love on both sides was profound. They married in 1952.

Robbins, a bit older than Tanny, was infatuated with her from the time they met, and said she was the reason he decided to the join the New York City Ballet and work under Balanchine. Some of the most moving parts of the film are excerpts from letters between Jerry and Tanny (read by actors) that bespeak a complex mix of friendship and romantic feeling, one that was destined to leave him both enthralled and frustrated. He apparently was crushed when she married Balanchine.

In 1956, the company went off on a European tour at a time when the specter of polio was terrorizing much of the world. While most of the dancers took the newly invented Salk vaccine before they left, Tanny decided at the last minute not to. She was stricken in Copenhagen and put in an iron lung with expectations that she would not survive. She did pull through, but would never walk, much less dance, again.