Dark Beauty

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2011)

Darren Aronofsky has a thing for ambiguity. For those who like their films to leave some food for thought once the credits roll, he has a way of subverting our expectations, making us question all that happened before giving us a coda that inspires its own set of queries. What really happens after that final shot in "The Wrestler"? What transpires the following day in the lives of the junkies who have hit bottom (but still remain alive) in "Requiem for a Dream"? Just what the heck is "The Fountain" all about? For most of his career, Aronofsky has toyed with viewer expectation, and while his works up to this point have never approached the out-there, sexually provocative dreamscapes of David Lynch or the deeply distorted psychoses conveyed through the eyes of Roman Polanski's tortured protagonists, "Black Swan" comes pretty damn close to capturing a claustrophobic waking nightmare on film. Slim on character history or any sort of background detail, Aronofsky weaves the tale of Nina (Natalie Portman, in a role of equal parts beauty and visceral horror), a young ballerina who lives with her unhinged, washed-up mother (Barbara Hershey), and pines to take the lead in her troupe's production of "Swan Lake." When she snags the part (under the menacingly perverse and perfectionist eye of director Vincent Cassel), her waking life spirals into a hallucinatory madness that is at first subtle, but becomes increasingly otherworldly as the curtain nears. Things are compounded by Lily (Mila Kunis), the thrill-seeking Yin to Nina's naive Yang, who may have ulterior motives in befriending the newly minted lead. Aronofsky established his camera as an invasive stalker as he followed Mickey Rourke around (with sometimes uncomfortable physical closeness) in "The Wrestler"; with "Black Swan," he uses physical closeness to not only push us up against the fatigue and dissolution of his characters, but to immerse us in a unique sphere of activity (the last film I recall using ballet as a focal point is Dario Argento's "Suspiria"); the result is a film that is always in a state of motion -- sometimes fluid, sometimes jerky; but always progressing toward something. True to its title, "Black Swan" is centered on the darkness of the soul, the dark motives of men, and what people do in the name of perfection; it is a troubling, stylistically assured masterpiece that would make a great (and near-equal) double feature with Polanski's "Repulsion."