I warn you now that this review is going to discuss Black Swan in great detail; it is not a short review, because Black Swan is not the sort of film that someone would want to explore with brevity. Suffice it to say that if emotionally wrenching, relentlessly bleak, psychologically and viscerally disturbing films are up your alley, you should be buying your ticket to the film right now. Everything you've heard about Natalie Portman is true, and you will not be disappointed. Once you've finished the film, please come back and join me after the following (perfunctory) synopsis.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is an up and coming dancer in a New York ballet company living with her over judgmental mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), a dancer who gave up her dreams while pregnant with Nina, and who keeps her daughter in a perpetual state of adolescence. Nina pushes harder impress Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the troupe's director, who announces that star performer Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) is "retiring," Nina auditions for the dual roles White and Black Swan in Leroy's reworked version of Swan Lake. Thomas feels her perfectionism is ideal for the White Swan, but the emotionally unstable Nina is too reserved to embody the Black Swan, and he begins looking at Lily (Mila Kunis), a new dancer with the company. Can Nina become both roles, and truly embody the Swan Queen, or will her neuroses get the better of her?One cannot accuse Darren Aronofsky of subtlety, but that should not mean that Black Swan suffers from being direct in its presentation of an emotionally unstable young woman pushed well beyond a reasonable comfort zone. Black Swan is a film littered with mirror imagery, of doppelgängers, and color coded thematic shifts. The film is rich with imagery with which to interpret, although at times obvious visual metaphors appear (for example, Nina's mother always wears black, Lily always wears dark grey of light black, Thomas wears a combination of the two, and Nina begins the film wearing all white and slowly transitions to black clothing by the end of the film; you figure out what's going on there).
That being said, the film is quite reserved for the first half, only hinting at the depths of Nina's psychosis, of her repressed "state," with ambiguous visual clues in reflections - the film is quite seriously littered with mirrors, in almost every scene - but Aronofsky shows restraint early on, only going "over-the-top" in a dream sequence towards the end of the film. Everything else is designed around the physical punishment of dancing, of injuries both real and perceived, like a cracked toenail or Nina's tendency to scratch at her shoulder blades.
Her state of doubt, of the need to be "perfect" is understandable considering the environment she finds herself in - the aloof Thomas, her mother prevents doors from being locked and paints portraits of Nina as a child, the potential threat from other members of the troupe, all of whom are more bitter than supportive. It's no wonder that Beth walked into traffic when she learned that this season would be her last - Thomas left her with no negotiating tactic but the fragility of her body.
Black Swan is a bleak, unforgiving film; Aronofsky, with writers Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin, have spectacular actors to carry out this relentlessly dark film. Natalie Portman is a sight to behold as Nina, a young woman on the cusp of stardom, wracked with doubts, perceived guilt, and a desire to be perfect at the expense of her own sanity. Portman keeps Nina's calm veneer up long enough that the audience forgets we are only watching the story from her perspective, her interpretation. She guides us along the "did we see that or didn't we" moments, along every implied contact, every askew glance, without ever allowing the audience to objectively judge Nina.
It's important to view other performances with respect to that fact that, in its construction, Black Swan is only ever about Nina. It's only how Nina sees the world, which is why so much of our introductory time with her is spent from the camera placed behind her head. Mila Kunis embraces every aspect of Lily, the temptress, the seductive siren, the glory thief, the reckless youth, and balances them all in such a way that no one side of her ever seems to be the "true" Lily (save for - perhaps - a small moment near the end of the film), but only the "Lily" that Nina sees.
Barbara Hershey is brutal as Erica Sayers, who micro-manages Nina's actions to dangerous levels, insisting on treating her like a child, cutting her nails, and emotionally blackmailing her (Erica buys Nina a cake, and when Nina panics with weight issues, her mother threatens to throw the entire cake out, saying "then it's garbage.") She critiques Nina but then hints her daughter can't handle the pressure, and when Nina lashes out - to what degree we aren't sure, as reality begins to bleed into fantasy at this point in the film - Erica collapses.
Vincent Cassel plays Thomas as imposing, as distant, and to Nina in search of "perfect," but not the perfect she seeks. His advances, suggested by nearly every other dancer, appear less as predatory and more as emotionally manipulative with Cassel - he is as dangerous to Nina as her mother, but not in the way other dancers expect. Winona Ryder doesn't make much of an impression as Beth, and she's not supposed to. Beth's actions are more important to Nina's story - Nina idolizes Beth, and steals he things in an attempt to be more like her - but Ryder has an ultimately thankless job to carry out. But none of these characters are designed to be fully realized, or even archetypal (which they are not, for the most part); they are meant to be concepts of people imposed onto human beings by Nina's psyche, like the leering old man on the subway train or her random "hook up"'s at the club with Lily.
Aronofsky does something very interesting with the staging of Swan Lake; rather than presenting the ballet as its own section (as another film I'll mention below does), he keeps the camera held tightly on Nina as she dances (and Portman, who studied ballet, is certainly doing all or almost all of it), showing us the audience, backstage, and at times, the stage from a front view. Swan Lake is only important to see as she sees it, as is in keeping with the rest of Black Swan.
I must admit that I was hesitant to see the film. After months of positive "buzz," a handful of very negative reviews swayed me by appealing to an esoteric vein of cinephilia: Black Swan had a bit of a critical backlash online because of Aronofsky's "artistic repetition" - borrowing heavily from other, less known, sources: there's a dash of Polanski's Repulsion (the often claustrophobic shot composition), a healthy dab of DePalma's Carrie (the mother daughter dynamic), more than a little bit of Sisters (Nina's "dark side" emerging during sexual encounters), and a hint of Bergman's Persona (how much of Lily is Lily and how much of her is a projection of Nina?). The elephant in the room, the "lift" cited with the most frequency, is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes.
The Red Shoes comparison comes with good reason: the films are thematically identical, narrative-ly similar stories of obsession within the world of ballet, centered around one performance that defines the ingenue, but which will bleed over into reality and destroy them. Both films break characters down into a series of triangles - in The Red Shoes, the primary example is Julian / Victoria / Boris, and in Black Swan, you can choose between Nina / Thomas / Lily, Nina / Thomas / Beth, or Nina / Erica / Lily (or Thomas, the catalyst for the Nina pushing away from her mother). Black Swan and The Red Shoes also end in remarkably similar ways, with their respective heroines "possessed" by the spirit of the ballet, and plunging to their "death"s. They are, nevertheless, very different, as I will explain.
While Black Swan is reminiscent of The Red Shoes in essence, its execution is where the films differ, and why many people (including the Cap'n) are able to shake off cries of "copycat!" Aronofsky, in a movie that sets Black Swan apart from many of its cinematic ancestors, opts to shoot a psychological thriller in the same manner he presented The Wrestler to the world: in hand-held photography, often following Natalie Portman from behind or holding closely to her face. Shots away from Nina tend to resemble candid, documentary-esque shot composition. The lighting is designed to appear natural, as though captured from actual sources (lamps, street lights, car headlights).
The artifice is stripped down, so that Nina's descent is gradual, its effects more disturbing. Aronofsky relies on digital trickery slowly but surely in the film, mostly in the films many shots of mirrors, but also on the injuries Nina endures early on - scratches, cracked toenails, tears around fingernails - the cumulative effect of which is far more unnerving than later, less subtle moments of digital manipulation (the legs in particular). Black Swan tends to go off the rails near the end - especially during the dream sequence in Nina's room - but its reckless abandon near the end is tempered by the slow build of body horror earlier on.
The visceral nature of Black Swan reminded me of another film I hesitated to include above: David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. The moments are fleeting, often misleading hints of more serious injury than actually exist, but one can draw a line from Seth Brundle removing his fingernail to Nina peeling too much loose skin from her finger (if only imagined), or another moment in a dream when something finally emerges from her shoulder blades. The "literal" transformation into the black swan during Nina's performance is, however, something I would not point out as a parallel necessarily - the moment is almost certainly within her mind, as is the dream that opens the film and the "wound" that may or may not have "killed" her at the end. The body fascination, the metamorphosis (including the webbing of toes), is nevertheless an echo of Cronenberg's "Body" period.
The other critical distinction between the two films is that The Red Shoes is a melodrama, a story of love complicating perfection, of obsession that consumes the heart and forces Victoria to choose between her love (Julian) and her passion (ballet, embodied by Boris). There is no romance in Black Swan, only obsession; Nina is utterly incapable of "letting go" of her desire not to be the best dancer, but to be perfect. Her perpetual emotional arrested development (fostered by her mother, a failed dancer) causes her to bottle up raw emotion, and her doppelgänger, the "black swan" Nina that emerges at moments of doubt, of ecstasy, ultimately consumes here. Black Swan dances around sex, but not in romantic terms; sex is a weapon in Black Swan, a tool to drive wedges between people, to unleash a primitive darkness, and more often than not, to disrupt Nina's ability to engage with others beyond a surface level.
I look back at Black Swan, only a few days after seeing it, impressed by the approach taken by Aronofsky, who could have easily embraced a wilder aesthetic in the film (as he did with The Fountain or Requiem for a Dream), but instead chose to filter a psychological study through the grounded reality of The Wrestler - of which there are a number of parallels film students might want to consider looking into, least of all being how each ends - with mostly successful results. I am not generally in awe of a film, let alone one that demands the viewer watch it again; for every clear and obvious visual metaphor, there are a half dozen or so subtle moments that merit further inspection. While Black Swan is certainly the product of fine cinematic antecedents, do not take that to mean it cannot stand on its own; I assure you, it does.
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