Towers Above Its Genre, That Awful Psychedelic Genre

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 2014)

Don't choose this movie, as I did, because you are hot for little Natalie Portman, and know she will be in ballet tights.
Maybe chose it for the echoing themes, in the Cabaret style, played out in the protagonist, and in the show her character performs, and in the movie itself. That's always what they used to call a 'head trip'.
Of course she plays a ballerina cast to play both the good white swan and the evil black swan. The director kept scolding her for never letting go and releasing her dark side. Meanwhile, there is an over controlling former ballerina mother, and a former mentor, now just fired, and a younger, more confident rival. And the director seemed like a sexual predator, and that his penis was the key to stardom.
It could have been terrific suspense, but instead, it was impossible to tell who was crazy, and what was real. There were horrifying scenes of her self mutilation, but some of the wounds that we saw inflicted weren't there, and some that we didn't see, were. The mentor was pretty surely hospitalized. But various stabbings of the mentor and rival and some hand smashings of the mother may or may not have happened.
It was psychedelic, I realized the next day. Christ I haven't seen a psychedelic movie since they flowered in the late 60's and gradually faded out in the 70's. And glad of it. I hate them. But this film was riveting and intense, so it towered above that genre.
And I got more true horror from what Natalie did to her cuticle than from various beheadings and disembowelling scenes in other films.
Natalie was more than willing to show her body scrawny and ugly, and her face ugly and distorted in intense passions. She is, as we know, a very good actress. Unless it was very good special effects, she also became a very plausible ballet dancer, at least to my ignorant eye.
Another ballerina, aging, did the swan flapping move, and the camera lingered on how the muscles and wrinkles worked in her strong but scrawny back. The impression it gave went through fascinating, into gross, but then back out again into more fascinating and even impressive. Good for the director!
So, it's unique, creative, intense, powerful, moving, fascinating, with multiple layers of symbolism and themes. It towers above its genre. But I hate that genre and don't know what the hell happened!