Rubbish from beginning to end

Rating: 1/10 (15 January 2011)

I'm just back from watching a preview of Black Swan. Natalie Portman and Milla Kunis as ballerinas in an unnamed American ballet company, Vincent Cassel (well-known and rather good French actor) as the director of a new production of Swan Lake, Barbara Hershey as Natalie Portman's mother. Film directed by Darren Aronofsky (responsible for The Wrestler).
Verdict: Complete load of garbage (that's the polite word for it).
There's the germ of a good idea in there. Ballerina driven to succeed by domineering mother; duality of Black Swan/White Swan personality; jealousy and back-biting within the ballet company. Unfortunately, whatever might have been made of it was thrown out the window by the writers and Mr Aronofsky, and the result is a ludicrous succession of increasingly less believable and more ridiculous set pieces, propelled by cliché-ridden psychobabble dialogue and grotesque CGI horror effects (blood, tearing skin, etc). Oh, and of course, a camera that is stationed perpetually looking over the shoulder of the principal character and can't stay still for a single damn second.
There's one user review on IMDb that says that the result is a feast of so-bad-it's-almost- funny high camp, and that just about nails it. There were two points at which I (and most of the audience) laughed out loud at some piece of surpassing crassness. There's a lesbian scene that is so gross, crude and unerotic that I couldn't watch it. (Watch The Hunger (Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon) or Mulholland Drive (Naomi Watts and Laura Herring) to see well it can be done.)
The director tries everything he knows to make the film intense and compelling, but fails more completely with every new trick. At no point does the film engage any emotion other than amazement at how inept the whole thing is. The really sad thing is that it's been nominated for a swag of awards, and almost all the critics' reviews and user reviews on IMDb say that it's great, a masterpiece, tour de force, etc, etc. For those who think it's high art, here's the latest news: the emperor has no clothes.
I gave it a score of 1 out of 10 because that was the lowest available.