It's biopic of famed dancer Isadora Duncan (Vanessa Redgrave) who lived from 1877 to 1927. Most of this is a bit low intensity despite the freeing performance of Redgrave. She is the star and the sun of the show. The intensity picks up with the Soviet part of her life. It's really the only major drama that she faces. Before that, her life has a lot of loves and life but it's not the highest of drama. The Soviet part is really interesting and I think the movie could have centered around that. Let's face it. This is all about Vanessa Redgrave. This is a compelling watch for her performance.

A showy but empty biography, a scrapbook of lifetime memories as dictated by internationally-acclaimed modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927),whose gaily eccentric behavior in her later years is shown to be akin to that of Auntie Mame, by way of Paris and San Francisco. Karel Reisz's film was retitled "The Loves of Isadora" in the US, shifting the emphasis from Isadora to the men in her life, and one might be tempted to say the movie follows suit. Isadora's lovers, Paris Singer (Jason Robards),Gordon Craig (James Fox) and Sergey Esenin (Ivan Tchenko) are portrayed as the fuel to her fire (and this following a prologue featuring a 12-year-old Isadora vowing allegiance to her art over love). In the lead, Vanessa Redgrave is not a dancer, nor is she American--and she can't imitate either (her exaggerated American accent has a monotone twang, as if she were speaking English phonetically). While Redgrave is certainly lovely (US movie posters advertised the film with a pink-tinted photograph of a bare Vanessa romantically covering up, her eyes dreamily closed)--and, in performance, her long arms are eloquent and expressive--one can immediately tell director Reisz is protecting his star with his editing. The film looks beautiful, but it isn't beautifully realized. It's tumultuous and melodramatic and volatile, but there must have been more to Isadora Duncan than her craving for male companionship and her affection for the Soviets. When she's in a man's arms, staring into his eyes, it's fitting that Reisz should intercut shots of Isadora dancing alone on a bare stage, photographed from above. But when that romance is over, the filmmaker takes his diva right along into the arms of another man. A batty Isadora in her late 40s complains aloud of being betrayed--and this picture ostensibly about her is the ironic response. **1/2 from ****

The life of Isadora Duncan, a famed artist and dancer of the 1900s to the 1920s, is explored in this film. She is embodied by actress Vanessa Redgrave and it is a match made in heaven. Vanessa wears the cloth of Isadora like a wrap, gracefully but with firm determination. We see Isadora in present day - 1927 - and also in flashbacks that show how she came into prominence. Isadora's presence and personality draws the viewer in as she herself tends to withdraw. You feel her movements throughout the film as being small but meaningful and her breaths are but wisps. Lilts. Tips. Vanessa as Isadora is hardly trying to emphasize any one thing and therefore makes the film an experience in feeling everything. A lightness permeates the film, along with the symbolism of the man driving the car that almost hit her, of whom she searches for thereafter. She does have men in her life - James Fox and Jason Robards, who's a millionaire of the Singer sewing machines empire. But they are only secondary to Vanessa. A mysteriousness and sadness encircle the life we are witnessing through losses, fights, and political views. Take in the life of Isadora - the passion, the impractical, the flighty, the will. She might be her own undoing, but she was Isadora Duncan.