This one goes out to all you ladies. With your latent homosexual fantasies and your controlling mothers and your passionate devotion to art and your inability to resist stern Frenchmen and your Madonna/whore split and your Euro-inspired masturbation in front of your sleeping mothers and your teddy bears in your tiny pink undies.
What?
Yes!
Black Swan is the art-is-hard companion piece to Darren Aronofsky’s athletics-is-hard film, The Wrestler. Natalie Portman plays ballet dancer Nina, who dreams—literally, in the first frames of the film—of playing The Swan Queen in a New York production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Ladies being, y’know, gossipy bitches, shit gets bitchy in this backstage drama. The role is coveted, calling on a virtuosic combination of white swan grace and black swan impulsiveness. It comes down to Nina and Lily (Mila Kunis), a darker, more intuitive dancer from amoral San Francisco. Also coveted is the ballet's director (Vincent Cassell) who glowers, leers and shouts Very Inspirational And Motivating Things at the dancers, like Anthony Robbins on an art school tour.
But it’s Nina who takes centrestage. The film keeps a tight focus on Portman’s cloistered world: she rehearses all day then returns home to a creepy, overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) and dreams of sexual liaisons. She goes out at night with Lily once, gets wasted and then pole dances. Or was that Closer? She does take drugs in this one. I know, because I remember the blinky strobe lights, garish electro track and wonky handheld camerawork.
As Nina, the pretty virginal ballerina, tries to draw out her dark side for the production, she becomes not only more reckless but also teeters on the edge of schizophrenia. The anxious, neurotic ballet dancer has a loose grip on reality. Her world of artistic, expressive labour is punctured by strange visions—she can’t tell what’s real and what’s imagined. People shapeshift, appear and disappear, pictures talk to her. Her role, both as Swan Lake star and perfect daughter, begins to consume her. This is director Darren Aronofsky’s terrain: Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan are all about various forms of consumption, literal and metaphorical. Appetites for destruction?
As Nina loses it, the film morphs into a sort of high-toned horror film. But Aronofsky wants it both ways: he wants the graceful art film, all those the chiaroscuro shots of ballet dancers in spotlights, as well as the frights and abjection of the horror film. It falls in some sort of middlebrow no-man’s-land, stuck between his perennially earnest, This is Serious Filmmaking mode and what could here have been a camp, glamorous, over the top freakout.
There are some genuine frights and some beautiful sequences. Some moments of real inspiration—the final dance sequences, in particular, are compelling. Tchaikovsky’s music is drawn on throughout and lends the film an uncommonly good score. Although, I’m not sure about the wisdom of overlaying Nina’s masturbation sequence with a particularly ripe Tchaikovsky piece.
Nevertheless, even when Aronofsky goes for shots of wounds and battered ballerina feet, everything is pat and just so. (My thought while watching: this needs more Cronenberg.) As in all his work, it’s like this was to be a formal set-piece for MTV—enough grit and strobe for the kids, enough pomp and poise for the adults.
The narrative too seems like it should have been played less straight. There was some talk about whether this would be another Showgirls, a kind of intentionally hammy, camp, bitchy backstage piece. But Aronofsky wants neither ham or cheese on this, just a big stale bagel of clichés. As a drama, it seems the director was too caught up in the stylistics, because it’s hard to identify with Nina or anyone else, for that matter. The film seems concerned with giving the appearance of drama rather than actually sweeping us up in it. “This is what a serious film looks like today,” someone kept shouting in my ear. “Ballet. That’s serious.” I found myself not much caring what happened in the end. And a little bored, if I’m completely honest.
Black Swan opens in cinemas on January 20, 2010.