Keeping good Company

Robert Altman's The Company is wonderful: a tender, genial film about a dance t roupe which uses real members of the Chicago Joffrey Ballet alongside actors in its cast.

There is no plot as such, but there is a story - of the ordinary working lives of the dancers and their boss, Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell).

Neve Campbell (a ballerina in Canada before becoming an actress) plays Ryan, an ambitious dancer working her way through the ranks. I say ambitious, but she is no grasping Medusa - quite softly spoken, f lushing slightly whenever she gets attention, rather grown-up

about her life. Most of the film is dedicated to watching her and others dance - in rehearsal, in performance - but things happen around the fringes, too.

Ryan has a romance with a young chef, Josh (James Franco), and Antonelli holds meetings about funding and choreography, helping the company prepare for the first night of their new ballet, The Blue Snake. This modern work is the film's only weakness, since it dresses its dancers as yellow dinosaurs and pieces of fruit, and seems, as Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited once said in front of a worthy but pretentious work of art, "T-terrible t-tripe".

But, no matter. As usual, Altman's lens is like a bumblebee, hovering over dancers talking about injuries or their digs or a certain step that they find tough.

This camera is nosy but it is not a detective - it has no interest in baring souls. It simply seems to be enjoying the pulse it has found among the performers.

But the few scenes outside the company, away from the dancing, are actually the most magical. Ryan first meets Josh in a bar over a game of pool. Altman shows her noticing that she is being watched, and then shows Josh watching her with a look of lustrous cheek on his face (Franco once played James Dean on American television, and you can see why). This is Altman at his easiest, his most unruffled, and complete.

The Company
Cert: 12A