Dancing the fine line between beauty and horror

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2011)

Black Swan should not have worked. It mixes so many different tones and genres - it's a sports-movie-like tale of an underdog fighting to achieve the seemingly impossible, a twisted psychological thriller about deception and paranoia and a dark coming-of-age story about a young woman discovering her sexual and emotional limits - that on paper, it looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Even many of the film's admirers admit that it is, to some extent, campy, B-movie trash. And yet, in large part due to the indie/artistic sensibilities of director Darren Aronofsky, it is also one of the most intriguing and haunting films of this year.
The film unfolds like an extravagant ballet, relying more heavily on visuals to entrance the viewer than plot or dialogue. Many of the movie's most memorable sequences have little, if any, speaking, instead using a kaleidoscope of striking images as well as Clint Mansell's beautifully sinister score to create a suspenseful, dream-like atmosphere. With breathtaking dexterity, Aronofsky manipulates every technical aspect of his medium - from the murky lighting to the elegantly designed costumes and sets - in order to reflect the film's themes of appearance verses reality and self-discovery. Notice, for instance, the abundance of mirrors or the frequent use of black and white clothing or even the sleek cinematography, which conflicts with the more grisly subject matter; such painstaking attention to detail transforms Black Swan into an intricate maze of metaphors and hidden implications that any ardent film critic could spend hours dissecting.
Even the actors exude mystique and ambiguity as they all portray characters that, at least ostensibly, consist of a baffling medley of nuances, contradictions and riddles, their true natures disguised under a perpetual veil. The supporting players are especially enigmatic: as Thomas Leroy, Vincent Cassel emanates both sophistication and a quiet depravity; Barbara Hershey portrays the protagonist's mother as amorous yet overbearing, driven to the brink of hysteria by the need to protect (or control) her daughter; lastly, Mila Kunis is pitch-perfect as Lily, a mysterious new ballerina, embodying her with the correct balance of charisma and menace. Nonetheless, the star of the show is inarguably Natalie Portman, who, in a luminous, career-best performance, fully embodies the obsessive ballerina Nina Sayers and the numerous paradoxes she exemplifies – her ruthlessness, her vulnerability, her passion, her innocence. Together, the actors play a cast of characters who feel real yet somehow elusive, and like the movie itself, we never quite know whether to trust them.
However, the debate at the heart of the movie – or at least the one most likely to spark controversy – is the way in which it totters between art (as in an "art film") and exploitation. Even knowing beforehand about the much-hyped lesbian sex scene, I still found myself disgusted, shocked or simply confounded by many moments in Black Swan, especially those involving Leroy's none-too-subtle attempts to seduce Nina, and at my screening, some scenes provoked laughter from the audience; whether this was intentional or not, I couldn't tell. How much is too much? As directors seek to expand their boundaries and experiment, the question of how much violence/sex/profanity constitutes too much comes up more and more often. At times, the gore depicted in Black Swan verged on sickening, something that seemed more fit for "torture porn" like the Saw franchise than a highbrow indie film, and no doubt many critics have denounced it as little more than second-rate horror disguised as "art". Nonetheless, there is something beguiling about Black Swan, something that separates it from countless other pretentious art-house films that take themselves too seriously. This is, after all, a movie about contrasts and boundaries and the ambiguous nature of reality. Even from the opening scene, the viewer senses that beneath the glamorous surface, darkness simmers, and Aronofsky does a masterful job of gradually heightening the tension, bit by bit revealing the film's grotesque soul, until by the climax, the viewer is entangled in a tumult of deceit and fantasy. It is a testament to Darren Aronofsky's talent that we can always sense a purpose behind the madness. Although graphic and disturbing, like a gorgeously rendered nightmare, Black Swan lingers with you long after its last image fades.