Zizi, Je T'Aime.

Love is also the theme of Zizi, Je T'Aime, which will be shown month on PBS's Great Performances. Produced and directed by Mischa Scorer for the BBC, this documentary on French choreographer-dancer Roland Petit and his wife, dancer Zizi Jeanmaire, allows the artists to tell their own story. (The only outside opinion comes from British critic Clement Crisp, who comments enthusiastically on their first British performances in 1949.) From their meeting as nine-year-olds at the school of the Paris Opera Ballet, their lives and careers have been entwined. The turbulence of their early working relationship and courtship sounds like the drama of a Petit ballet, and they discuss it with an enlivening dry humor and playfulness. Jeanmaire recalls being very jealous when Margot Fonteyn came to dance with Petit's Ballets de Pads in 1948, while Petit remembers Jeanmaire insisting that she star in Carmen (1949) when the new ballet was proposed. Petit tried to discourage her by insisting on a number of what he thought were outrageous ultimatums, such as, "I will cut your hair like a boy." But she said "Fine" to them all. Carmen was their triumph and their love.

When Petit and Jeanmaire burst onto the international postwar dance scene, they personified the chic cosmopolitan essence of postwar France. Petit's choreography extended the possibilities of dramatic ballet, especially erotic pas de deux, in works such as Le Jeune Homme et La Mort (1946) and Carmen. Jeanmaire's gamine persona, with her close-cropped hair, tight little body, and wide smile, presented an alternative model of the ballerina. The video offers ample clips of Petit's sultry choreography and Jeanmaire's befeathered performances in musical revues and films.

The couple is romantically photographed against scenic backgrounds in Paris, London, Geneva, and Marseilles, as the documentary moves beyond the 1960s to Petit's brief stint at the Pads Opera Ballet and his twenty-five-year tenure as director of the National Ballet of Marseilles. There he created more than sixty ballets, among them, in the 1980s, a Swan Lake with male swans. Now in their seventies, the two artists still thrive on their work and love. Both are seen in the studio passing on their knowledge to a new generation of dancers. Jeanmaire coaches Russian ballerina Altynai Asylmuratova in Carmen. She herself works out on the Pilates "reformer" machine with an instructor. Petit explains that Zizi "must be onstage because he has a good time when she is onstage." He is part of her public. There is no talk of quitting for either of them, only of new projects, an expression of both their love and art.