BLACK SWAN, 2010
Movie Reviews!

Nina (Portman) is a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her obsessive former ballerina mother Erica (Hershey) who exerts a suffocating control over her. When artistic director Thomas Leroy (Cassel) decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Ryder) for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake, Nina is his first choice. But Nina has competition: a new dancer, Lily (Kunis), who impresses Leroy as well.

Release Date: 3 December 2010 (USA)

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REVIEW:

Fresh from wiping the blood off the wrestling mat, Darren Aronofsky returns to the cutthroat arena of competitive performance art in order to depict the poetic and merciless world of ballet.

This is one of those films that make you bleed along with the central characters, which is a quality that was somewhat lacking in “The Wrestler”. Although these two movies are similar in terms of color and presentation, the in-depth character study of Nina (Natalie Portman) plunges fathoms deeper than Mickey Rouke’s Randy “The Ram” could manage.

The director himself has said: “Wrestling some consider the lowest art – if they would even call it art – and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves.”

Best of DARREN ARONOFSKY Movie Director
Best of NATALIE PORTMAN Over 120 pages
Best of MILA KUNIS Over 120 pages of SCENES, VIDEOS and PHOTOS
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Even though Aronofsky can be credited for breeding intense fear and loathing upon the ballet stage here, “Black Swan” truly belongs to Portman, who delivers her best and most emphatic performance since “Closer”. Her take on Nina is a careful balance between innocence and exoticism. Her character is an introverted student faced with the assignment of opening the door to an unexplored and expressive sensuality. In order to become the Black Swan, she must literally kill the personable duckling she once was, and defeat her competitive rival as well. Mila Kunis represents this obstacle as fellow ballerina Lily, whose animalistic presence threatens to usurp Nina’s portrayal of the Black Swan. Through this competition, they forge an unlikely and eccentric friendship that helps Nina discover her repressed sexuality.

At the heart of this Methodist approach is Nina’s perpetual ambition. She doesn’t want to score the lead for “Swan Lake”. She needs it because everything else in her life is secondary. Her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina herself, acts as both catalyst and victim to her daughter’s obsessive objective. Erica’s support for Nina is at first unsettling when you get a look at her bedroom walls that are literally plastered with homemade paintings of her daughter. But as Nina’s feathers grow darker in the second act, Erica’s concern becomes less overbearing and much more tragic.

In fact, if you take away all things Dance from the devoted Nina, it is hard to imagine how she would function in the artless world of material industry. Her passion for this performance begins as focused but later borders on compulsive. She and the other ballerinas in the company may be civil to one another in person, but they are also deeply manipulative and conspiratorial. And the casting scenario of “Swan Lake” catches Nina, Lily, and their fellow dancers at their utmost determined.

In ways that resemble Tchaikovsky’s use of music to associate the theme of metamorphosis, Aronofsky orchestrates the tension and madness underneath Nina’s inner-conflict as if they were educational assignments handed to her by the company’s director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). According to Cassel, Leroy is loosely based on George Balanchine, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, who was “a control freak, a true artist using sexuality to direct his dancers.” His role in instructing the dancers is a cross between aesthetic perfectionism and reprehensible sleeze.

Whether it is the sensuality of artistic performance or the erotic portrayal of lesbian sex, this film will win audiences the world over not only for its thematic content but also for its impressive cinematography, vivid choreography, and committed performances. The only shame is that it could not feature more of Winona Ryder, who plays the former prima ballerina replaced by Nina’s emerging success. She represents a mournful grey shadow in this story of White Becoming Black. The concept behind her character offers a frightening outlook on what follows fame in the world of high-performance art. The answer, in traditional Aronofsky fashion, is self-inflicted mutilation.

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BLACK SWAN