By the Movie Critic
Rating: R
Score: 4/5
Darren Aronwofsky, it is often said, loves to make gorgeous movies that you never want to see again. Black Swan isn’t an exception. Natalie Portman, however, is exceptional. Playing the role of Nina, a young ballerina determined to be the next big thing in a fictional New York ballet company, Portman is transformed.
Always petite, in this movie she’s very near emaciated. In addition to her diet, she’s reported to have undergone an excruciating exercise and training regimen, one that continued throughout the production of the movie. Certainly, all that deprivation and discipline has paid off richly – the critics have all but bestowed this year’s Oscar for Best Actress on her.
The truth is, her performance inspired queasiness more than once. Nina is really not a very complicated character – her connection to sanity appears tenuous from the very beginning of the movie, and by the end of it, she’s in freefall. She drags the audience into her hallucinations with her, and Aronofsky makes sure you never really know which ones are real.
And it doesn’t end there. Both cinematography and script are brimming with images of twins, lookalikes, fractured reflections and doppelgangers. The plot itself follows the story of Swan Lake, but the vein of the grotesque runs quite strongly through it, spilling over into a ballet production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
So far designated to the shadows, Nina is about to step into the limelight as a ballerina in a fictitious New York dance company. But to do so, she must first impress Thomas (Vincent Cassel) the artistic director. She is stepping into the shoes of his old prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder), and finds that it might be just a little more than she can handle.
The ballet requires that the same dancer play both white and black swans, and the sensuality and abandon of the latter seems beyond the scope of the very repressed, very naive Nina. Though she does get the role, it is mostly due to her lovely interpretation of the White Swan’s dance. Though it doesn’t help her insecurity that Thomas already has her replacement lined up. Lily, (Mila Kunis) is everything that Nina is not. Abandoned and gorgeous, she has Thomas’ approval.
A ballet performance, more than many other art forms is pure illusion. Those lifts and jumps, those pirouettes require perfect balance and great strength, but the dancer herself must be ephemeral, barely breaking a sweat. In this movie, however, Aronofsky pulls back the velvet curtains to reveal the incredible strain, the sacrifices and constant striving that each dancer must undertake. (In one scene, Nina’s pretty pirouettes are rudely shattered by the sound of her toe nail cracking as she goes en pointe for the hundredth time.)
For me the most spine tingling moments came toward the very end of the movie, where Nina’s transformation is complete. That the cast surrounding Portman all turned in really stellar performances only made the moment complete. And when it was over, I must also admit to a little relief. Something about how bizarre it was, how abruptly it moved from one inexplicable thing to the next, kept me off balance. But not so much that I couldn’t appreciate how beautifully it had been made.
Many comparisons have been made to The Red Shoes (1948), but this is as if that movie had overdosed on hallucinogens. And through it all, Portman, panting, wild eyed, exquisitely beautiful and entirely demented, is the one you can’t take your eyes off. |
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