Nina, the Crazy-Crazy Ballerina, in "Black Swan"

Rating: 10/10 (29 March 2011)

This is certainly one of the better films I've seen of an actor who becomes a character who becomes another character. (Whoa.) This is the case with Nina Sayers (Academy Award-Winner Natalie Portman), a perfectionist New York ballet dancer who is cast in a stage production of "Swan Lake" as the lead Odette, the pure, delicate, innocent "White Swan." The overbearing creep of a theater director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), who is the one behind the production, thinks that Nina has the White Swan part of her character down perfectly, but the greater part of the seductive, evil Odile, "Black Swan" is causing her great difficulty because she is not "losing herself" in the part. Greater difficulty comes from Nina's overbearing mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), who is a failed dancer now an amateur artist. Pretty soon, Nina begins to display a number of frighteningly psychotic symptoms, representing itself in a number of disturbing hallucinations and paranoia, the latter brought on by her belief that a fellow cast-mate who has just flown in from San Francisco, Lily (Mila Kunis), is out to steal her part away from her. "Black Swan" is one of the better films I've seen in which an actor (or actress, in this case), really comes to transform themselves into someone (or something) else entirely, in which by the end they are totally unrecognizable from the person that they were before; that is one of the most significant things actors and actresses can do in their film roles, and Natalie Portman's Oscar-winning performance here is one recent, pristine example of this. She starts out as pure and simple and innocent - like her White Swan "Swan Lake" character Odette - but soon she finds herself treading deeper, darker waters as Odile, and the film tracks her gradual descent into madness and despair. The film makes no attempt to cover up the physically demanding arena of the ballet world; just look at some of the injuries Portman's character endures in her quest to become the best. Darren Aronofsky directed the film, which is a dark meditation on perfectionism and psychosis in the ballet world - since many people may have a hard time associating mental illness with the art. Aronofsky isn't one of my favorite filmmakers, but he did direct "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), which is one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the best anti-drug pictures ever made. Because "Black Swan" deals somewhat with the notion of doppelgangers and being haunted by an evil double, I make a brief nod to the Japanese animation (Anime') film "Perfect Blue" (1998), a psychological thriller that Aronofsky paid homage to in a famous scene in "Requiem for a Dream" with actress Jennifer Connelly. Just something to think about if you get the time to see either film.
10/10