The Pink Shoes.

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2011)

This may be one of the most deliberately confusing movies ever made. Somebody started off with an interesting variation on an old idea. Let's have a very talented person go nuts while achieving stardom and then die after much suffering and one absolutely perfect performance.
Instead of the rock scene or movie stardom -- among the more common venues -- we'll set it in the ballet arena. That's full of egotists, isn't it? Kind of like opera? It's a reasonable enough premise. Being a ballet dancer is no easy job. It requires infinite practice, precision, devotion, competitiveness, and a physical fitness rivaling that of a championship boxer. Enough to drive anybody nuts.
Then it must have occurred to someone that a movie about a young woman, Portman, who becomes a star at the price of her own sanity is going to have an audience of about ten people, not including the producers and their mothers. Who's going to watch a movie about going for the perfect saute fouette? So they juiced it up using two techniques, both of which manage to scrap any pretensions to seriousness that the original idea might have had.
The film has all the clichés of any other straight-to-DVD horror movie. There is the oppressive and demanding mother, Barbara Hershey, from "Carrie." There is the "friend" who may or may not be angling for the role of prima ballerina. The dance director, Cassel, is an untrustworthy heterosexual, and if I remember you'll find the same figure in "The Red Shoes". There's no one else of importance in the movie. Cassel is staging "Swan Lake" and he sees in Portman a very good white swan full of the usual virtues but not her evil twin, the black swan. Portman can't seem to let her passions loose so Cassel gives her helpful instruction like, "Go home and touch yourself." (She can't do it because she's interrupted by the image of her overbearing mother.) Later, Cassel takes Portman aside, begins smooching her fiercely and feeling her up until she begins to respond. At this point he pushes her away and says, "See? I'm seducing you when it is you who should be seducing me." The fool. There isn't a single person who listens sympathetically to Portman. Even her affable understudy, Mila Kunis, may have ulterior motives for trying to get Portman to loosen up, have a few drinks, do a Lude or two.
But it's very difficult to tell whether Kunis is a real friend or not because Portman is cracking up and the viewer, like Portman, is unable to distinguish hallucinations from reality. The Jungian shadow is always nudging its way into her life. Does Portman really kill Kunis? If so, she does it in a formulaic and unrealistic way, copped from innumerable other horror movies. She grabs a piece of broken mirror and shoves it into Kunis's belly. As usual, the point pierces the stomach and leaves the hand clutching the glass unmolested. You can't help wincing when you see something as dumb as this. It's like the scene in which two guys are fighting and one knocks the other out by bumping heads. Newton's third law is herewith repealed.
And the hallucinations, which seem to involve everything in and around Portman, gives the computer-generated image guys an excuse to go berserk. For no reason at all, while Portman is alone, both her legs snap into the shape of chicken legs with the knees backwards. I guess nobody could think of where to take that dismal picture so it fades to black. I mean, what are they going to have her do, sit down in a chair? Through all this mishigas, the camera never leaves Portman alone long enough to take a breather. She's a beautiful young woman, though her voice comes out in her few lines as a kind of hoarse squeak. But, really, she's in just about every frame and almost always in close up. If she runs down a hall, the camera wobbles along, a foot behind her head. Talk about oppression!
It isn't that horror movies are in themselves bad. It all depends on how they're done. Hell, Val Lewton turned out some psychological horror movies at RKO in the early 40s that were masterful, and on a budget that wouldn't sustain a normal person for a year, and barely keep a gerbil alive. This one had genuine potential. It did not actually need CGIs that turn Portman's hands and forearms into bloated, gangrenous limbs. Acute schizophrenia can be rendered in subtle ways too. See Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." I, for one, am beginning to regret CGI was ever invented. Useful for dinosaurs and UFOs, yes, but they're becoming an excuse for not thinking enough about the plots themselves. When your mind becomes blank, you just have somebody's face fall off. Pfui.