Features > Movie Reviews > Black Swan…

I mean, it’s a film about ballet – High Art – but it’s also a lurid psycho-sexual horror movie, which is about as low as you can go.

Perhaps because it feels so unique, it has sent almost every critic reaching for comparisons. How else to explain something inexplicable? It’s like nothing co-writer/director Darren Aronofsky has made before, and yet it’s also a companion piece to his last film, The Wrestler (which was also about a performer pushing the human body to the limit), and it certainly echoes his earlier Requiem for a Dream and Pi in intensity and paranoia.

I’ve also seen comparisons with Dario Argento’s Suspiria (a horror movie in a ballet studio); with Satoshi Kon’s anime Perfect Blue (about an actress with an unstable sense of reality); and with such backstage melodramas as All About Eve; Centre Stage and Opening Night. Not forgetting The Red Shoes, of course, to which every ballet movie must be compared. (The New York Times review wittily suggested Aronofsky was after making “The Red Shoes Diaries”).

The toxically close mother daughter relationship is reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s classical music film, The Piano Teacher. And then there are allusions to a trio of Roman Polanski films: The Tenant (schizophrenia); Repulsion (schizophrenia); and Rosemary’s Baby (satanic impregnation). Just joking about that last one, but people have made the comparison, I just haven’t grasped why.

Aronofsky has admitted that Repulsion was an inspiration, and it seems to me cast the deepest shadow over his movie – though Catherine Deneuve wasn’t a dancer in that movie, and her crack up was specific linked to sexual hang-ups. Here, Natalie Portman is an inhibited virgin – still living with her mom, in a pink bedroom, surrounded by cuddly toys, and in one high camp scene instructed to touch herself by her director (Vincent Cassel). Yet the film is less about a young woman terrified of sexuality than it is a film about an artist drawing on her fears in search of perfection.

See, Thomas (Cassel) respects Nina’s technique, but technique is not enough. To carry off Swan Lake, she has to play not just the white swan, for which she’s a natural, but also her evil twin, the seductress black swan. For that, Nina will have to convince him she has a sensual side.

Right on cue, in walks a new dancer to the company, Lily (Mina Kunis), whose technique may be sloppy, but who knows how to have a good time. Lily seems determined to befriend Nina, but is she sincere? Is she even real, come to that, or just a fantasy Nina’s has dreamed up to help her play the part?

The Black Swan is a bold, audacious, and terrifically stylish piece of filmmaking. The design and visual texture is creepy and compelling, and I’ve never seen CGI used in a way that is both so organic and simultaneously so expressionist. In some scenes Aronofsky slyly superimposes Nina’s face on other bodies; in others, she very skin seems to shimmer.

It’s cleverly cast too, with Winona Ryder as the washed up, former prima ballerina. Kunis is excellent as the ambiguous Lily, and Vincent Cassel lays it on appropriately thick as the company director, a sleazy Svengali who may also claim just be doing what’s best for the work.

Natalie Portman has tried to ditch her goody-two-shoes image before, but still it seems to stick. More than any other, this role shows her sticking her neck out and showing her vulnerability. She doesn’t strike me as a great dancer, but the film is shot in such a way as to disguise it – very effectively, I must say. It’s a great performance in its way, and it’s very likely to bag her an Oscar to go along with that Golden Globe.

Yet for all that, I have to The Black Swan seems to me a fundamentally hollow exercise, and a very silly film at heart. Granted, it’s pretty good on the physical rigors professional dancers have to put themselves through. But the psychological side of the film feels like unadulterated tosh. It’s enjoyable trash and brilliant pastiche, nothing more, nothing less.