Movie Review: Black Swan
Ballet is a monster. Or so suggests Darren Aronofsy by way of his latest film.
Two years after resurrecting the career of Mickey Rourke and moving audiences (meaning me) to tears with The Wrestler (2008), the director has put his stamp on the year 2010 with Black Swan, a nightmarish exploration that reunites the filmmaker with the surrealism so distinctive in his previous works. This go around, he trades wrestling for ballet, and in place of Mickey’s weary gaze and weathered face is the graceful, fluttering visage of Natalie Portman.
Portman plays Nina, a dancer at a New York City ballet company, striving to be noticed by her domineering and egomaniacal director, Thomas… or rather, toh-MA (Vincent Cassel). Soon, through a somewhat creepy set of circumstances, Nina is cast as the lead in the company’s revival of Swan Lake, just as a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), arrives at the company to shake things up.
The role of the Swan Queen is actually two different characters in one: the enchanting white swan who wins the love of a young prince, and the alluring black swan who eventually, through a case of mistaken identity, seduces the prince away, leading to the white swan’s demise. The latter is a role less dependent on precision, relying more heavily on physical sensuality and a sexual freedom that Nina, a meticulous technician with a manically pathological work ethic, has great difficulty accessing. She is reminded of this constantly by Thomas, who harshly points out her inadequacies during rehearsals and earns major creep-meister points by morphing into a kind of sexual puppet master. Nina is momentarily comforted by a burgeoning friendship with Lily, a weaker but strikingly more charismatic dancer, who tries to shake Nina loose of her own self-control.
But Nina isn’t chasing freedom. Her true pursuit… is perfection.
Swan is largely a story of the artist’s toxic obsession with this impossible goal, and the destruction it causes when expectations and dreams blur into madness. The more she pushes herself, the more she starts to flail… and starts careening toward Crazytown. What unfolds is a Kafkaesque tale of creative delusion, complete with wild paranoia, self-mutilation and one drug-fueled lesbian encounter (I spoiled nothing. Watch the trailer).
It is an impressive visual accomplishment; both awesome and gruesome. Aronofsky is a master of creating beauty out of ugliness, a perfect fit for his chosen subject, which comes wrapped in its own mystique. Ballet is a form that demands supreme physical control with the look of floating on air. Dancers appear to soar on stage because in the time between performances, they are running their bodies into the ground. Those lovely pointe shoes wrapped around their feet that give length to the body lines also conceal a mess of blisters and bloodied sores. Every lift is another bruise, every twist is another morning of back pain. And off-stage is no different. What appears so pristine and elegant on the service is actually a labyrinth of politicking and fierce competition… and at times, sabotage. But ballet’s appeal has always been in its refinement -its poise- which seems to draw in its more blue-blooded audience, who likely gives little thought to the drama that plays out long after the curtain goes down.
Aronofsky constructs this world with great care, and his work in Swan is unquestionably gorgeous. But the film is wrapped in a fog of coldness that, intentional or not, keeps his audience at a distance. I have noticed the word “visceral” getting thrown around quite a bit in other reviews. But that’s pretty much the only time I’ll use it. There is certainly intrigue and tension; a mental unrest that develops from watching Nina come unhinged. But the experience isn’t so much “visceral” (I lied) as it is a psychosomatic reflex; the arthouse equivalent of covering your eyes during the scary parts. While we are engaged and interested in Nina’s torment, we never give much thought to her humanity, partly because we never really see it. The ballet, as it turns out, isn’t merely a backdrop or an expression of the human story underneath — it is the entire story; a parable of what can result when our artistic pursuits turn cold and maniacal, when the psyche gets swallowed up… and the artist prevails over the self.
Though Swan may suffer from the weight of its own psychosis, it does contain some stellar acting. Portman delivers one of her most adult performances to date. She infuses Nina with an almost inconsolable fearfulness that only heightens her mental instability. Mila, as Lily, is appropriately saucy, and her spunk provides a distinctive, but in-no-way-cartoonish contrast to Portman’s mental frailty (Mila, you’re adorbs and you give wonderfully sassy interviews). Vincent has made a career of playing arrogant, somewhat smarmy men, which would be a problem if he were bad at it, which… not at all. And Barbara Hershey is a glorious ball of nervous obsession as Nina’s controlling stage mother.
Black Swan is certainly a worthy accomplishment, inarguably one of the most original visual works I have seen in some years and engrossing from start to finish. But its aura is one of detachment… distance. As someone who holds every viewing experience as an opportunity for empathy, I left this one feeling patently unsatisfied.
