Review of Black Swan (2010) by Christopher B — 31 Aug 2013

And now to the movie. I honestly can't say I liked it as a whole because I didn't. Personally, I found it to be a little underwhelming but I guess I have all the hype surrounding it to thank for that. This is certainly a companion piece to Aronofsky's last film, The Wrestler, in that it unflinchingly presents the toils and rigors of a profession not too well known by today's masses. In both films it seems that in order to achieve desired effects and results one must primarily undergo extreme physical pain and bodily deformities that are hidden by costumes and not seen by audiences. Split fingernails, bruises, broken bones, steroids, bulimia, fucking your boss, you name it, wrestlers and ballerinas will do it. I'm pretty sure you'd have to be a little nuts just to attempt doing either one on a professional level. Both professions are dog eat dog and just the psychological toll to get to the top and stay on top alone must be exhausting and I can see why it would make for interesting material for a movie. Such was the case with The Wrestler and now presently the case with Black Swan. I deeply commend Aronofsky for not shying away from showing us some of what it apparently takes to be a professional ballerina although let us not forget the important fact that all films are nothing more than artifice so we must treat the physical deformities shown in Black Swan as such even if they do appear to scream a very brutal truth at our eyes and ears.

Moving on, as far as the characters were concerned, minus Natalie Portman's character Nina, I at first felt that all of them were very cardboard and one dimensional. That is until it was pointed out to me that the entire film is shown from Nina's perspective. That changed things up a bit. You see, Nina is a ballerina chasing after perfection. Dancing is her life. She is so focused on getting every little detail of every move right that she never spends time with other people. Her best friend is her mother. Her perception of her dancing comrades and teachers barely scratches the surface of who most of them are as people outside the studio. So they are more or less portrayed as such in the film. However despite that I also found them to be more or less cliched. Vincent Cassel plays Thomas Leroy, the head of the studio and a womanizing prick that reminded me of the previous characters he portrayed in Oceans 12 and Eastern Promises. He better be careful or he could become type cast for life. Barbara Hershey does her best to play Nina's overbearing and overprotective mother Erica but at times I couldn't help thinking of her performance as just a tame (thats right, tame) version of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. Mila Kunis plays Lily, the Black Swan to Nina's white. She is a bold, confident whore of a dancer from the West Coast and it seems Mila Kunis's performance was only effortless because she had effectively played this type of character for so many a year previously on the TV series That 70's Show. As for Winona Ryder, well, I honestly can't say why she was in the film at all, her character felt so lame and pointless. She has fallen a long way from her Edward Scissorhands days and now it seems she has resigned herself to taking a backseat to today's younger talent, ironically a lot like her character in the film.This film however belongs to Natalie Portman and its her show. Her portrayal of Nina I thought was so convincing and so well done that for her not to win Best Actress at the Oscars this year would be sacrilegious. I certainly felt for her and all that she went through in the film and that is a testament to Portmans acting.

As I said earlier Nina is a ballerina who lives alone with her overbearing/ protective mother. She is chosen to portray the coveted dual role of the White and Black Swans in an upcoming production of Swan Lake. However it appears Nina is so uptight, so perfectly innocent that she cannot emotionally free herself enough to also portray the dark, sensuous Black Swan. The pressure to achieve this combined with Nina's paranoia that Lily is trying to steal her role from her drives Nina over the edge and over the course of the film she realistically hallucinates she is painfully transforming more and more into a swan as she tries to free up the darker side of her personality. Repressed sexuality is definitely a major theme of the film and Nina's certainly gets really, really unleashed in a long night sequence I consider the low point of the film where Nina is seduced by Lily into going to a bar and picks up a couple boys and dance and screw them and others while being drugged up. Lily and Nina then proceed to go back to Nina's apartment and have sex in a scene that seemed to me straight out of a gay porno. More than anything I can say I was offended by the apparent message that in order to live a little you have to essentially become white trash. But from this point on though the film becomes better and better. I personally thought the last third was nothing short of an absolute tour de force in all areas. The dance sequences were extraordinarily breathtaking and the shot where Nina imagines she has grown feathers all over her body and stands before the audience in her final pose were some of the most beautiful frames of film produced this year.

A few last notes. The images were certainly beautiful, nightmarish, and horrific among others but I was a little put off by the use of hand held cameras. There is no doubt they were used to give the film a documentary feeling but having the frame continuously bob up and down made me feel a little bit queasy at times. I feel like if they had put the camera on a crane it would have smoothed out the motions with some of the dance sequences. The use of mirrors throughout the film to show Nina's dual personality was also great touch but they felt like something straight out of any number of films made by Orson Wells. The ending I felt was predictable since the film very broadly follows the story of Swan Lake itself so it didn't surprise me when it was shown that Nina did not stab Lily with a piece of glass but rather herself instead. Nina finally frees her darker side when she believes she has killed Lily and is able to deliver a stunning performance as the Black Swan. Only after this when she goes back to her dressing room to change back into the White Swan and Lily comes and congratulate Nina does Nina slowly realize what had actually happened. The fact that Nina does not call for help but instead goes through with the last act of the play shows just how tragic a character she really is. She was willing to forgo her own life in an effort to finish her performance and finally achieve perfection.