Ends with a swan dive

Rating: 7/10 (9 August 2014)

Over the years, most movies about the ballet would have ignited the kind of dreams that had young girls and their mothers lining up at ballet schools the next day. I'm not so sure "Black Swan" would have that effect. It's a pretty dark story, which depicts the rigors of ballet at the top level, and the pitfalls of single-minded obsession.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballerina with a leading New York ballet company, is about to get her big break as the principal dancer in a new presentation of "Swan Lake". However she has issues.
She feels guilty about the ballerina she is replacing, and worries about a new ballerina from Los Angeles who could replace her. She feels stifled living with her mother, and is repressed socially. She also doesn't seem sure about her gender preferences as far as sex is concerned. All this is going on as she struggles to assume the dual roles of the good White Swan and the evil Black Swan in the ballet. She begins to experience strange phenomena and has difficultly distinguishing reality from fantasy. Then there is the self-harm, which is wince-inducing as she attacks herself.
Eventually, everything comes to a head on the opening night of the ballet.
Ten years before "Black Swan", the director, Darren Aronovsky, made the mother of all horror movies, "Requiem for a Dream". It didn't have a supernatural aspect nor did it blur real events with imagined ones – it was a raw slice of life about drug addiction, which made it doubly terrifying. Although "Black Swan" has a sumptuous ballet backdrop, it is more of what we think of as a horror movie, and has plenty of visual tricks.
As the story unfolds we realise that nearly all the strange events we see are actually in Nina's mind although her hallucinations are presented realistically on the screen. But we need to believe the reality of the scenes when she snaps out of it.
With that in mind, I can't help feeling that Aronovsky breaks a rule at the end; he cheats on the internal logic of the story with an ending I just can't believe, intense as it is. The injury Nina seems to have received in her dressing room would have most of us on a hospital gurney, crashing through the doors of the nearest emergency room with paramedics pumping our chests – not completing two strenuous dances before pirouetting to the top of the set for a standing ovation from the audience; the real just isn't real. For me it's a lapse in a movie that kept the tension ramped up to a high level throughout.
Even if you agree with that, "Black Swan" is still a powerful experience and worth seeing just for Natalie Portman's performance. Apart from breathtaking dance sequences, where her double could not have been involved, she projects alarming vulnerability, but is also the epitome of a beautiful, graceful, swan-like ballerina.