Badii, a middle-aged man driving slowly through the streets of Tehran in search of someone, scanning crowds of men clamoring to be hired for labor. The film opens with the actor Homayoun Ershadi’s face. When the New Year started, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and, because the title was appealing and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded “Taste of Cherry,” by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant, until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films lying on my back with my foot up. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked, because the choreographer said that he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as white as the skin on our asses.

And though my awareness of this was a dark blot on what had been, up to then, a pure joy, I didn’t know what to do with it.Įxhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical-that what I had taken for devotion had crossed the line into something else. When I met people in bars and cafés, I spoke excitedly about the experience of working with the choreographer and told them that I felt I was constantly on the verge of discovery. Sometimes tears came spontaneously, from something that had rushed upward and burst. We rehearsed from noon to five, and I devoted myself to the choreographer’s process and vision without reserve, applied myself without reserve.

When at last I auditioned and he invited me to join his company, I dropped everything and flew to Tel Aviv. I’d sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training.

It had been my dream to dance for the choreographer since I first saw his work, and for a decade all my desire had been focussed on getting there. I’d been in the company for more than a year by then.

Great house nicole krauss summary