Ballet good show

Rating: 7/10 (6 July 2012)

At last "The Red Shoes" has some competition. An imaginatively daring movie with ballet as its main theme, with Natalie Portman cast in the title role as the shy but ambitious ingénue who unexpectedly wins the prize part of lead dancer in a new production of "Swan Lake" and then finds herself pressurised into exploring the suppressed darker side if her on character to meet the demands of the part. The director really piles on the agony for her with almost clichéd characters of her pushy mother, handsome but exploitative director and jealously competitive rivals in the troop, but by constantly changing perspective, the viewer is never sure just what is going on. The camera is almost always in Portman's face or over her shoulder, conveying her growing paranoia and while her nightmare could on one level be easily attributed to a bad drug trip, she clearly had problems beforehand. I wasn't completely comfortable with some of the modernising aspects of the story, like the lesbian love scene, drug-taking and even the suggestion of incest, but there's no denying the dark momentum as her torment with some genuinely thrilling if disturbing moments on the way to her final apotheosis in the title part, especially the scene where she literally metamorphoses into the Black Swan character as she triumphantly overcomes a fall in her performance. The acting is a mixture of the stylised and naturalistic, contrasting the everyday with the other-worldly. There are no doubt deeper psychological interpretations open about Portman's Nina character with her awakening sexuality and mother complex prominent amongst them but I preferred to just watch the film as an oddly old-fashioned backstage melodrama and be swept along like the great ballet and of course wonderfully florid music it takes as its starting point. In this day and age of SFX comic-hero blockbusters, I was glad to engage with an old- fashioned if over-the-top psychological thriller which certainly kept me on my toes (sorry!) throughout.