Walking: the Oxford Canal to Jericho

I took today off work to round out my break (when you have 41 days leave a year, including bank holidays, and pretty much can't take leave at all for over half the year, adding extra days to breaks becomes a way of life; I'm trying to avoid having to fit a month's worth of leave into the three months from July to September) and as it was a nice day we decided to walk into town via the canal towpath and go to the cinema.



The canal runs very close to our house and we quite often walk into town that way, though this is the first time since last autumn. It's just under five and a half miles to the Picturehouse in Jericho and very pleasant on a sunny day; it feels quite rural for most of the way, and today there were lots of daffodils along the banks, hedges and willows just coming into leaf, and several donkeys in the field just past the A34 bridge where there is always at least one donkey.

Watching: The White Crow

The Year of Biopics continues with The White Crow, Ralph Fiennes' film about Rudolf Nureyev's early life and defection to the West. The White Crow merges three distinct timelines: a sepia-tinged rendition of Nureyev's early life in a bleak, snowy Siberia; his time as a student at the Kirov academy in Leningrad, and in particular his relationship with his teaching Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin (played by Fiennes speaking Russian throughout) and his wife Xenia; and his first Western tour in 1961, where he delights in giving his minders the slip to visit the Louvre and spend his evenings with French dancers and socialite Clara Saint. It's a beautifully-done period piece, and I appreciated Fiennes' decision to render all of the dialogue in the original languages, so that English is only used as a lingua franca to allow the Russian and French characters to communicate. Fiennes also chose to cast Ukranian dancer Oleg Ivenko as Nureyev, eliminating the need for a body double for the dance scenes; Ivenko's Nureyev is a very young, rather sulky man, taking full advantage of his star status to enjoy his first taste of freedom and spurred into the decision to defect by the knowledge that if he lets himself be taken back to Russia he will never know that freedom again.

It's an enjoyable film, though the focus on Nureyev's friendship with Saint, as well as a coerced sexual relationship with Xenia Pushkin, compared to an only slightly more than blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene making it clear that his relationship with German dancer Teja Kremke was a sexual one, does feel a bit like straightwashing.