a real disappointment after the brilliant 'wrestler' i expected more

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2011)

this movie was a huge disappointment. the red shoes is one of my favourite films and a good film about the ballet is well over due. i loved 'the wrestler' again an extraordinary and tense movie, and so i had high hopes of 'black swan'.
i could not have been more let down. the first and i suppose forgivable failure in the film was the poor dancing of natalie portman. the red shoes was fortunate in that it could rely upon the prima ballerina skills of moira shearer. natalie portman is no prima ballerina, no ballerina at all in fact and this spoilt much that could have been wondrous.
but natalie portman can act, and she acts her socks off in this, however, with what material. the character is meant to lose her sanity gradually and sink into a hallucinatory and dark world of her own imagining. and that's just it, i found the world described in her thoughts totally uninteresting as dreams actually are for the most part. i found it difficult to care about the narrative which followed so much of what happened inside someone's head. so what that nina stabs to death, lilly, her fellow dancer, when a few minutes later the colleague knocks on her door fit as a fiddle. yeah this proves that nina is nuts but it also dilutes the story. anything can happen, king kong can appear, he can destroy the whole damn lot of them, but so what. its all just a dream and when we wake up, its gone - puff.
there is much else to criticise. it was a film of ideas, but these ideas were not particularly intelligently explored. consider the rather lame and clichéd analysis of a young woman's sexuality, the very deliberate contrast between the virgin and the whore and the absurd finale of the young dancer's perfect performance and her insistence on her own death to complete it. i ask you.
anyway in sum this film doesn't deserve to air the same breath as the red shoes or the wrestler.