Movie Review : Black Swan (2010)

Country:

USA

Recognizable Faces:

Natalie Portman

Mila Kunis

Vincent Cassel

Winona Ryder

Directed By:

Darren Aronofsky

Since the crushing flop that The Fountain has been (come on, how many of you even remembered it?), Darren Aronofsky has become a born-again author. By that, I mean that he left behind his MTV-laced, heavy-on-editing, fast paced directing style, for something more simple, more visceral. Camera on shoulder, lots-of-close-ups, tight and packed up frames, etc. At first, I missed the demented mind that put Requiem For A Dream into images with a terrifying success, but his new style works a lot better for Black Swan than it did for The Wrestler in 2008. Or was it just flat out a better film? Maybe it was Natalie Portman's strong interpretation, or Vincent Cassel's eternal bad guy routine, but I thought Black Swan was Darren Aronofsky's best movie since Requiem For A Dream.

Maybe even the best movie of his career.

The subject is already a lot more gripping than a beat-up wrestler, trying to squeeze out a few dollars. Nina Sayers (Portman) is a ballerina in a dance company who is opening its season with a bare, raw interpretation of Swan Lake. The choreographer Thomas (Cassel) wants to put some emotion, a fresh vision into this classic. For this, he selects Nina, the most technical, yet the coldest dancer of the company and takes on himself to try to corrupt her and put her in the right state of mind to play the black swan, which is an evil part. Since the white and the black swan are twins, they need to be played by the same dancer. Only problem, Nina is psychologically fragile. She grew up with a single, abusive mother, in an unhealthy environment, so any kind of tremor will send her spiraling down into madness. And as usual, Vincent Cassel doesn't help. He gets Lili (Kunis), a "sexually liberal" (for a lack of a better term), to work on Nina's case.

Like I previously said, Aronofsky's newfound style helps carrying the intensity of his point. The introverted Nina has a flourishing inner world that turns into weirdly convincing daydreaming, to straight up hallucinations. And I'm not talking about the common Hollywood-cliché hallucination, the converse-about-the-hermeneutics-of-French-writers-with-you kind, but rather the realistic-split-second-moment-of-terror one. The intimacy and the claustrophobia of the close-ups, the tight frames and soundtrack are well adjusted to Nina's fragile psyche. I think that what got me the most was the gradual use of Swan Lake's score, to symbolize Nina's symbiosis with the black swan. As her actions get more radical and her hallucinations get to be more overbearing, she heard the soundtrack of the ballet louder and louder. And that, my friends, it the essence of real insanity. The loss of differentiation in between the reality and the image. I am not sure I have seen a director capture this as well as Aronofsky did. Madness first lies in the detail, then in the absolute and Black Swan is right about that.

I don't think there's anything I disliked about the movie. Barbara Hershey was a bit shoddy by times, but she has a very secondary role. The presence of Winona Ryder's character is also kind of useless to the story, but I suspect she was put there by Aronofsky as an attempt of total faithfulness to the original text. There is also that weird burger eating scene that I didn't get. Black Swan's flaws are so small and the intensity grows so high that you forget about them and finish the movie mesmerized, completely oblivious to any sort of cracks in that monumental work. Some people might be startled by the ballet part of the movie, but it's minor, it serves the purpose of showing Nina's descent into madness. Black Swan has been billed as a thriller/drama, but it's also a tragedy, in the classical sense of the term. It's a very good example of re-appropriating and re-deploying a timeless dramatic structure, to present a new era of viewers. This should have got the best movie Oscar. Because it's spectacular, because it's difficult and because it lives up to the challenge.

SCORE: 94%