When reflections start looking back

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2010)

I do a little taoist meditation exercise most nights that involves me staring at my reflection in a mirror. It gives me an eerie feeling most times, doing it last night after I'd finished Black Swan was almost unsettling though and I had to hold the sink at some point. The exercise is about adjusting the gaze so that you're looking into yourself from the outside, or being looked at by your own self. The point of transition, when you become aware of the meditation taking place, is when the reflection seizes to be a reflection. Black Swan of course does not tell us about tao, like most Western art it's a movie of polar opposites, light and dark, yet subliminally it grasps higher concepts that deal with the perception of a world.
This is one of my favourite types of film, the psychodrama that observes the fracture of a soul from within the fracture, from behind the cracked glass, and like the best works of Polanski Altman or Lynch it's in the hallucination of the mind that it finds a raison d'etre, the handle and hook by which it will sink deeper into a meaningful unreality. For the first part of the film the Swan Queen, the good decent shy young girl who wants to be the leading dancer, can see her reflection in the mirror, then as we near the end of the film, the reflections begin to see her. This is still happening from within though, it's the soul itself pulling the strings, there's no supernatural touch or the ambiguous suggestion of one. Some may find unsubtle that Aronofosky will frequently trap characters in their mirrored images, I only find it necessary, like a western can better communicate its ideas in the dusty sierra. Eventually, another mirror this time to the ballet story of the Swan Queen, the Swan Queen becomes her negative image and gives the performance of a lifetime but she pays a Faustian price for it. The idea is not earth-shattering of course but I find it wholesome, proper, what it should be.
Natalie Portman gives us one of the great fragile distraught female protagonists. Susannah York, Harriet Andersson, Catherine Deneuve, Zhora Lampert, Isabelle Adjani, Naomi Watts, with the exception of Adjani, she betters them all. I like the sudden neurotic touches of the imbalanced mother, which reminds me of Lynch, and how well Portman can play the figurative swan fraught with perils on all sides of her path. It's the soul that is at stake here and I love how Aronofsky creates the nightmare world. It's a nightmare world because Nina is not ready for it, because she can't let go and be a part of the flow, as though the world itself can sense the pull and resistance and begins to spot the anomaly. That anomaly in herself is rendered with monstrous almost-Zulawski tones of self-destruction and hysteric behaviour, and the sketch itself reminds me of similar wonderful films, Mulholland Dr., Repulsion, Images.
I wrote in the other thread that I think Aronosfky's timing with Black Swan is perfect because it allows himself to be directly compared with Fincher and Nolan. In Requiem he was struggling for maturity, here he comes to it naturally. By comparison to his peers, his cinematic eye fascinates me because it can imagine things and bring them alive, it dazzles and is dazzled in return. I love the scenes where Aronosfky's camera dances along with the ballet, that opening for example I find a stunner. I almost hope The Social Network wins Best Picture so that it will go on to become another Slumdog Millionaire or Hurt Locker to be forgotten in due time, this one on the other hand feels to me like special, spookily idiosynchratic, work that deserves a smaller audience than will eventually see it.