There is perhaps no discipline of the arts more grueling than ballet, coupling the emotional toll of competition and performance with a physical burden unlike any other, maintaining grace on the tops of your toes becoming a nonstop highwire act. Ballet is also the most sensual of the arts, communication through unspoken emotion, and if they seem beholden to the same handful of well-known plots, interest persists because it’s invention and execution that keep the people coming back, even if you know what’s coming every time. Appropriately, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is an inventive, well-executed sensory overload, even if it skews quite close to the tale it purports to present.
Noted director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) has put out a casting call in his company for famed old warhorse Swan Lake, requiring the lead actor to play both the virtuous and innocent Swan Queen and the sensual vamp Black Swan. Meek waif veteran Nina (Natalie Portman) is determined to get the part, but she has much competition in aging superstar Beth (Winona Ryder), local rival Veronica (Ksenia Solo) and seemingly friendly newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis), who arrives in the middle of Nina’s audition, cracking her focus. Leroy sees potential in Nina, but is skeptical that she can inhabit the villain side of the personality. Not helping her chances are her overbearing, emotionally unstable mother (Barbara Hershey) and her own increasing inability to distinguish reality.
I was surprised how close Black Swan ended up bumping up against the actual storyline of Swan Lake, but its closest emotional antecedent is Roman Polanski’sRepulsion, probably the eminent example of this kind of claustrophobic psychological thriller, the story of a manicurist losing her grip on reality in her sister’s apartment. Nina manages to get out of her apartment, but everything still seems to be closing in on her: she’s stressed by responsibility, no one seems to be giving her the complete score, and entire experiences and swaths of time seem to disappear down the rabbit hole of her own mind. Her paralysis comes not from fear of interaction so much as fear of failure, an obsession with perfection that consumes her life.
The film’s visuals are undoubtedly vivid, but it was surprising how stringently realistic much of the film is. When it works, it works, but many times, Aronofsky is content to continue the photographic strain he began in The Wrestler, that of the needlessly everpresent handheld shakycam handheld footage, appropriating the old Dardenne Brothers back-of-the-head walking shots for his own trademark. In spots, it’s breathtakingly dizzying, but much of it is wholly unnecessary, reminiscent of Michael Bay’s restless camera rotation in Transformers 2. Having the camera shake during benign, quit character moments risks numbing the audience when something is actually happening that requires an extra jag. It’s so superfluous it becomes distracting, an issue unto itself at several points (and keeps people with motion sickness from enjoying sections of the film for no apparent reason!)
Thankfully, while the visual effectiveness comes and goes, the acting is topnotch throughout. When actors drastically modify their bodies, there’s always a risk that the audience will become focused on the plight of the actor instead of the plight of the character, but here, Natalie Portman’s gaunt appearance has both thematic and dramatic reasoning, and she is mesmerizing throughout, inhabiting Nina so thoroughly that you genuinely begin to believe that Nina is physically incapable of showing any sort of strength, despite Portman’s previous work (and the trailers) letting you know she clearly will. Also wonderful is Mila Kunis, who gets her own sort of Punch-Drunk Love moment, a director reclassifying a comedic actor’s skills by putting them in a situation that brings out previously unseen drama (in this case, Kunis’s genial, sassy screen personality becomes unsettling and even menacing, even when she’s not doing anything in particular). The rest of the cast also effects this same wonderful, enigmatic instability, enlivening old tropes (the horny director, the crazy mom, the bitchy star) with enough grey shading to keep them fresh and interesting, as Cassel, Hershey and the underused Winona Ryder really hit the beats in intriguing, off-kilter ways.
Luckily, per the issues I had with the camerawork throughout a good portion of the film, the climax builds beautifully, finally spinning and swirling as much as the camerawork, everything crashing together, coming to a head, as you might expect, on opening night. In fact, if judged on what one might expect, it’s not particularly illuminating or surprising at all. But luckily, this is ballet, and as long as you’re inventive, execute well and finish strong, you’ll have something worthwhile. It’s far from perfect, but as depicted in the film, striving for perfection is what’ll get’cha in the end, and Black Swan, for its flaws, is a hell of an experience, and a heck of a watch.
[Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #2 (of 30) of 2010]
myboringlife42 