Pina is Wim Wenders‘ cinematic hommage to Pina Bausch.

Plot:
The film doesn’t really have a plot, instead it shows various scenes from choreographies by Pina Bausch, combined with a few interviews with dancers about the influence Bausch had on them and some archive footage showing the woman herself.

The film was beautiful. The choreographies were great (though I did not like all of them equally) and set in scene pretty wonderfully. The interviews with the dancers got a bit much, though.

[The text on the poster says: “Dance, dance or else we’re lost”]

Whether you like the choreographies or not is a matter of taste. I liked them a lot, mostly. They are a little weird, even for modern ballet and worked strongly with repetition – there is one short sequence of moves with which the film starts and which come up over and over again throughout the film, for example. There’s another scene, part of Café Müller, where a dancer falls over and over again out of the arms of another dancer and with each fall, it gets faster and to watch the way the acceleration and the repetition work on the movements and the dancers – it’s really quite fascinating.

And they were set in scene perfectly – some on stage, some in the city of Wuppertal, some in a park or outside the city. No matter where, the location always matched the dances. Makes me want to personally congratulate the location scout. Well done indeed.

The movie is supposed to be in 3D but I saw in 2D. Even though I can’t really compare it, I didn’t feel like it lost anything by not being 3D – it was still a visually stunning and completely arresting film. Quite to the contrary, the colours were so brilliant in 2D, I don’t think that would have worked with 3D. In any case it certainly is worth to see it on the big screen.

The only thing I didn’t like so much was the way the interviews with the dancers were handled. Wenders decided to have the text in voice over and just shot the faces of the dancers while we heard the text. Which would have been okay, albeit slightly strange. But generally, they were a little too adoring, a little too much “Pina the saviour of dance.” It reminded me of a cult.

Summarising: Definitely recommended watching if you’re interested in dance at all.