'ETOILES' GETS TO THE POINTE OF PARIS BALLET LIFE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

DANCE LOVERS will adore the fly-on-the-wall French documentary ``Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet.'' So will the casually interested, as the film delivers roughly equal amounts of beautiful movement and inside information.

Perhaps the only disappointing aspect of this fluid, intelligent and empathetic examination of one of the world's great ballet troupes lies in the distinctiveness of that information. For all its access and verity, the film does not teach us very much about the classical dance life that we would not have already assumed.

Yes, it's hard physical work; there's as much sweat in this movie as your average boxing melodrama. The pay isn't great, the training is all-consuming, marriage and childbearing are strongly discouraged - and it all begins in childhood, so these people rarely have lives (or friends) outside of the partners/competitors they were matched with before puberty.

All that work can be for naught due to the caprices of injury or a director/choreographer's tastes. Perhaps worst of all, as the best dancers attain creative maturity, they are already on a physical down-slope that will prevent them from fully realizing their best ideas.

Those and a thousand other unlikely aspirations and crushing disappointments inform the dancers' lives. But of course they do it out of love, and the film repeatedly confirms the universal purity of that passion. To his credit, director Nils Tavernier, the great filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier's son, quite effectively avoids histrionics by eliciting matter-of-fact commentary from the dancers on the extreme emotional seesaw that is their existence. In that poker-faced, very French way, they calmly but unblinkingly discuss inspirations and agitations that would give most of us (and do give most fictionalized films about the ballet scene) heaving palpitations.

Released overseas in 2000, ``Etoiles'' covers a bit of touring and the runups to several productions, including the classical warhorses ``Swan Lake'' and ``La Sylphide'' and some more experimental work, the most invigorating of which is a sports arena-set ``demonstration'' - not a ballet, according to choreographer Maurice Bejart - of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

We see little of the public performances but much of the painstaking work that went into them. Along the way, we hear from the teachers, directors, parents, students, understudies, energetic new corps members and retiring superstars. It really does feel like the full picture. But one can't help missing, like the absent graces of the final ballet presentations, something quirkier, surprising and more individualized about some of these peculiar lives that surely must exist beyond the margins of all that heart-pumping effort.

ETOILES: DANCERS OF THE PARIS OPERA BALLET - Three stars

(Not rated)

Director: Nils Tavernier.

Running time: 1 hr. 40 min.

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: Everything you always thought you knew about professional ballet - but not a whole lot that may be considered unique - is thoughtfully presented in this French documentary about Paris' premiere company. Lots of lovely dancing, it hardly needs mentioning, too.