Black Swan

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2011)

Watching Arronofsky's Black Swan is a bittersweet experience for me. After directing popular films like The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, this new "project" of his was way over-advertised and exploited by Fox Searchlight. Disregard the trailer. There is no lesbian subplot, though the kiss actually does happen. I could posit that Arronofsky does fetishize the sexuality of his actresses, and you couldn't dismiss me. Nor could you dismiss my assertion that Black Swan isn't nearly worthy of the accolades it has received. Even on National Public Radio, Arronofsky describes meeting with Natalie Portman ten years ago to discuss producing this film. Adding more fuel to the marketing campaign, he recalls the difficulty in obtaining the paltry 13 million dollar budget to produce it. Perhaps he should have spent more time and less money.
For the moviegoer who has seen a lot of movies, Black Swan becomes a fun game of picking out influences from other directors. Arronofsky doesn't plagiarize Carrie, Mulholland Drive, or his other favorite films, yet he doesn't place them into a new context. The bad relationship the main character Nina (Natalie Portman) has with her mother is emotionally identical to the one in Carrie, for instance. The ideas are instead jumbled together within the context of a ballet performance, which is amusing but in no way innovative.
Enough of that, onto the plot: Nina Sayers is a respected dancer in New York Ballet Company who earns the dual role of white queen and black queen in a new version of Swan Lake. She devotes both her life and her mother's to training endlessly for the parts. Despite her technical skills, the director (Vincent Cassel) does not think she can portray the seductiveness of the black swan character. A new arrival from the West Coast, Lily (Mila Kunis), arrives and impresses everyone with her erotic performances. Nina becomes confused and starts projecting her insecurities onto herself, Lily, which results in her demise.
Nina's circumstance is idealized to the point of incredulity. Her room is entirely pink, her mother makes garish birthday cakes, and the screenwriter actually named her "little girl" (niña, get it?). This isn't to say the setup doesn't work, but it goes too far. This riff recalls the eerie look of Neil Jordan's fantasies minus the subtlety. Some of her hallucinations involve lights being shut off and inanimate objects coming to life. If you think I have described a mild horror film, then you would be correct. What saves me from dismissing the movie entirely is Portman's otherworldly performance. She trained in ballet for nearly a year prior to filming, and the movie happily shows her in close-ups. It's her non-athletic sequences that are the most meaningful. The permanently frightened look that seems stuck on her face was finally put into the right movie. By only facial movements, she sets the tone from sinister to calm, as we anticipate further distraction.
There are some memorable shots in Black Swan, including the final which directly references The Wrestler. Watching that last shot helped me realize how much of an anomaly Arronofsky's last film really was. He calls them companion pieces, but the two have little in common other than their shared focus on sport-related anxiety. The former doesn't (on paper) sound like the more interesting film, yet it is. At least it isn't as cobbled together.
Recommended