Ruthless Perfectionism

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2010)

Clint Mansell tries to root this film's score in Tchaikovsky's classic ballet Swan Lake, though with revolutionary conversions to it. The film itself does the same. Vivid, visually invigorating, reflective, strange, well-cast and mercilessly severe like all of his films, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a singular experience, told with fanatical power, superbly and enigmatically bizarre. It fixes on a performance by Natalie Portman that is out-and-out courageous, and epitomizes the clash of good and evil in Tchaikovsky's ballet. Ballet, opera, musical theater, most traditional performance affords itself overindulgence. Ballet is one of majestic motion, of the fantasy of conquest over reality and even the certainty of Newton's laws. But it requires from its performers years of arduous precision, the sort of bodily and psychological preparation that takes control over ordinary life. This clash between the superlative and the real is overwhelming Nina Sayers, Portman's character.
Her life has been bestowed to ballet. Was that completely her decision? Her mother was a dancer once, and now bestows her life to her daughter's dancing. They split a petite apartment that seems alternately like a sanctuary and a chamber. They giggle and prattle like siblings. Something seems off. Conversely, the thrilling physicality of dancing is captured in Matthew Libatique's 16mm cinematography, with the psychosomatically unsettling scenes and, especially, the dance scenes.
Nina dances in a company directed by the domineering Thomas Leroy. The scope of his self-image is indicated by his present season, which will re-imagine the masterpieces (as Aronofsky seems to be doing to the very same production). Having discarded his former lead dancer and lover, he's currently auditioning for a fresh lead. Swan Lake needs its lead to play contradictory roles. Nina is undoubtedly the finest dancer for the White Swan. However Thomas finds her too "perfect" for the Black Swan. She dances with skill, not emotion.
Thomas, the brute, is notorious for having trysts with his performers. Played with threatening overconfidence by Vincent Cassel, he evidently has ideas about the chaste Nina. This generates a predicament in her mind: How can she liberate herself from the procedural perfection and sexual suppression imposed by her mother, while keeping constant to their lewd domestic relationship? There are also rudiments of All About Eve and Dostoevsky's The Double in her relationship with Mila Kunis' polarized character.
As much a rousing night terror as it is a mature theater melodrama and a daring sexual initiation for its protagonist, this hypnotically fanatical film will be reminiscent to some of Aronofsky's predecessor, The Wrestler. Both illustrate determined showmanship in the name of a calling, initiating the obliteration of personal lives. I was prompted also of Aronofsky's virtuoso debut with Pi, about a man driven berserk by his pursuit of the complete mathematical expression. Ultimately, his The Fountain was about a man who seems to overcome the whole coordinate system of existence. Aronofsky's characters make no little plans.
The focal plot scaffolding of Black Swan are time-honored: backstage enmity, life imitating art, bottled-up rage and painfully submerged lust. Aronofsky floats dissonantly from those trustworthy procedures into the mind of Nina. She starts to confound existential borders. The film opens with a dream, and it becomes apparent that her dream life is adjoining with her conscious one. Aronofsky and Portman track this audaciously where it takes them, into a fever dream blurring the fine line between a performer playing a role and a psychotic succumbing to delusion. The ensuing psychosexual commotion about a single-minded ballerina could've effortlessly been ridiculous and overexcited, but Aronofsky is able to twist those prospects to his benefit, and seldom aside from the films of David Cronenberg have the physiological effects of psychosis and its delirium been so primordially, plainly and roughly described. Polanski's Repulsion also seems a major inspiration in its story of repression leading to madness in a virginal girl.
Portman has never played a character this possessed before, and never confronted a larger physical trial. Aronofsky has a way of drenching his stars in ice water, then crashing in for the most candid possible close-up, literally and figuratively. Someway she becomes exaggerated and nevertheless remains in character: Even in moments of excess, you don't spot her acting. The other actors are like dance partners keeping her in the air. Barbara Hershey gives a completely attuned performance as a mother whose love is genuine, whose faults are not intimated, whose own strictness has all been zeroed on the formation of her daughter.
The misfortune of Nina, and of countless young performers and athletes, is that flawlessness in one aspect of life has led to forfeit in most of the others. At a young age, everything becomes concentrated on satisfying someone, and come what may it gets clenched that that idol can never be satisfied. One becomes ideal in every aspect save life itself.
This sincerely exhaustive conquest has an exquisite climactic peak. All of the theses of the song and existence, all of the analogies of narrative and dance, all of the mystification of reality and trance rally in a striking elation of soaring fervor. There's indeed but one place this can take us, and it does. If I were you, I wouldn't consume too much time struggling to understand precisely what occurs in a matter-of-fact way. Just lose yourself in the moments of muted, temperamental lyricism that yield grandiloquent visuals, in-your-face emotions, and a time-honored soundtrack that gets turned to full volume.