“Becoming Giulia”: In the cinema “Becoming Giulia”: Greetings from the pelvic floor

If you modify perhaps Bill Clinton’s most famous quote, it could also apply to mothers and their fight back to their old bodies: It’s the pelvic floor, stupid! This is also what happens to Giulia Tonelli in Laura Kaehr’s documentary “Becoming Giulia”. Tonelli is a principal dancer at the Zurich Ballet and became a mother three months ago. She says in one scene that you notice this most clearly during the jumps (greetings from the pelvic floor).

After a total of eleven months break, she returns to the stage in spring 2019 and Kaehr accompanies her for three years. On her first day of rehearsals for “Romeo & Juliet,” her colleagues greet her with applause, one even has tears in her eyes, and even the head choreographer – ballet choreographers usually have the image of a fire-breathing dragon in their head – welcomed her them with kind words. At this point it becomes clear that Kaehr wanted to make a different ballet film than one that uses the clichés that are usually available and that persist thanks to films like “Black Swan” (and in which there is certainly a lot of truth).

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Kaehr shows a protagonist who wants to do things differently: Tonelli wants to overcome the cold, the ruthlessness, especially the machismo, the prefabricated female roles (usually melting in love, languishing, unhappy). Why? Because her new role as a mother has made her stronger than ever, she says. Four months after the birth of her son Jacopo, she is back on stage in Zurich in the leading role of “Romeo & Juliet”, a production by director Christian Spuck.

Then hard cuts follow. You can see Tonelli folding rompers in the living room, cleaning the couch with a lint brush, cooking porridge that turned out to be far too watery, which she discusses with her partner Bernhard Auchmann. The contrasts couldn’t be more stark.

The Italian, born in 1983, spent her childhood in Pisa and was trained as a dancer at the Balletto di Toscana and at the Ballet Academy of the Vienna State Opera. In 2010 she joined the Zurich Ballet as a soloist. Her son was born in December 2018.

Kaehr, who was trained as a dancer herself, probably gets very close to Tonelli for this reason, capturing her face distorted in pain when she tries to do difficult figures and steps again after the long break. The camera (Felix von Muralt, Stéphane Kuthy) always dances with the protagonist or shows her very vulnerable when she talks about what little Jacopo has changed in her life.

Jacopo is a dream child, that becomes very clear over the course of the documentary. A conscious decision, in a world that couldn’t be more hostile to families. And Tonelli also sets this counterpoint just as clearly: prima ballerina and mother at the same time. It is possible.

Kaehr shows Tonelli discussing, complaining about rehearsal plans that are not made for mothers and are sometimes spontaneously postponed forward or backwards. It shows Tonelli, a world-class dancer, who does not understand instructions from choreographers (which are admittedly rather cryptic), but who also concludes that the incomprehensibility is intentional in order to keep the leash as short as possible. “They treat us like children so that we can be more easily controlled,” she says at one point.

Kaehr also shows Tonelli completely exhausted during rehearsals and at the kitchen table. If there are very important appointments, she takes a sleeping pill the evening before in order to have the strength for what lies ahead. At times, as a viewer, you are afraid that the film could end with Tonelli physically collapsing and having to end her career. Kaehr shows a woman who hasn’t had a single day off in three years. Who balances back and forth between her child’s allergy test in the hospital, diarrhea attacks with constant nighttime diaper changes and important rehearsals for a premiere.

And in the end, despite all these efforts, Tonelli still has the strength to say that she has ambitions that she won’t let people talk her away from, saying that she has already achieved her goal: motherhood. She wants to bring new female characters to the stage and one believes that this maturation process would never have happened if she were not now the mother of two children. You can tell that this is a woman speaking who no longer allows herself to be molded and doesn’t want to let herself be shaped because she has come into her own.

Together with the British choreographer Cathy Marston, Tonelli is embarking on nothing less than a ballet revolution. Both want to show women on stage who are not passive children, but strong characters like the adulteress Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlett Letter.” First via video chat, then also in personal conversations, they strategically approach their plan to get the piece on stage and want to found their own company.

Kaehr uses Tonelli as an example of where classical ballet stands and where modern ballet wants to go. It seems like a long journey and you can often tell that the film was made by an enthusiast who spends a lot of time on shots that are dedicated to the development of the material and characters during rehearsals. But that too has to be thought through to the end, because Tonelli herself says that the stories are just as important to her as the aesthetics, which in the ballet are staged almost inhumanly perfectly.

The fact that the British Cathy Marston, herself a mother of two, took over the artistic direction of the Zurich Ballet in the 2023/24 season shows that Kaehr’s film takes up a development that is essential if the ballet still wants to touch us today (which is… The time of filming was not yet known). The revolution can begin.

“Becoming Giulia”: Switzerland 2022. Director: Laura Kaehr. 103 minutes, start: January 18th

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