Brutally seductive, seductively brutal

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2010)

Aronofsky has proved himself by now to be a filmmaker of total and utter fearlessness, beyond brazen in his choices and the dazzling execution thereof, the innovative and consistently dependable master Shyamalan wished he could be, and with Black Swan, he takes Natalie Portman - and us - for the ride of a lifetime.
Any film which has the deliriously gorgeous - and also consistently dependable - Portman in nearly every frame is worth plunking down cash for, and if you throw in the fact that she plays a reality-challenged and sexually repressed ballet dancer torn between her loyalty to her mommy and her desire to please her ballet director, who needs her to access her dark side - starting with her sexuality - in order to portray both the White Swan and her alter ego, the Black Swan in his production of Swan Lake, you've got yer basic on screen goldmine, and Aronofsky mines this gold for every nugget it's worth and then some.
We know going in that Nina has a less-than-firm grip on reality - this is shown early on in a variety of ways - so by the time we're not sure anymore what's actually happening and what's delusion, it makes perfect sense. This is not a movie that skirts the issues - this is the full-blown, in-yer-face genuine article, with no holds barred.
Others have called it the female version of The Wrestler and I would say this is valid, in its brutal depiction of how far a person will go in order to achieve and/or preserve his or her life choices or artistic vision. In Nina's case, she gives everything - literally - for merely one night of glory, the price her split psyche has had to pay for 'perfection', and on this level the movie works as a parable, a cautionary tale of obsession, a theme which resonates in all the movies Aronofsky has given us, from Pi on. It also works on the levels of melodrama, horror, sexually repressed psychosis, fear of failure, loss of innocence, all this and more, and in the hands of any other filmmaker I can think of it would have been laughable. In the theatre I saw it in, today, at the end, as the credits rolled, nobody was laughing.