The Best Of 2010

Rating: 10/10 (26 June 2011)

A while ago, one of my coaches made a cruel joke about one of our best foot ball players who chose to become a ballet dancer. It was funny to me then, but now I see that it is probably more painful the process to acquire the necessary straight and technique the dancers have.
The Black Swan does honor to his name, not only on the Tchaikovsky role Nina Seyers (Portman) tries so hardly to improve, but also in Nina by itself. She is a "sweat girl": fragile, pretty, a dreamer, insecure. She is the White Swan. But, oh surprise, she doesn't have a Black Swan. She fakes it and, in a ballet, that's probably something that can be easily detected. The audience wants to see real feelings and Nina can't provide them. Her predecessor, Beth (Rider), surely has his good and personal version of it. Her ballet mate (or competence?), Lily (Kunis), should have not any White Swan at all, cause she is entirely a Black Swan, nothing more and nothing less. She's hot and vigorous. She's brave and confident. She has a two-black-wings-tattoo on her back, like to prove it. She's inaccurate but natural ("She's not faking" Thomas said). At one level, she's just what Nina needs to be to reach the so desired perfection. But, how can it be? That's what this movie is all about.
Anronofsky successfully trapped Portman's twisted metamorphosis into the Black Swan everyone wants to see, in one of the most beautiful performances of the year. A frigid, spoilt and fearful girl, big enough to take care of herself, but weak enough to tell her mother she can take off her clothes on her own. Frighten by the freedom, but more by the conflict inside, reflected in so many surrealistic takes that the movie basically could have told the story without audio. In those brilliant (and even scaring) takes, Nina is being forced by the specter of her evil twin, who seems to wish the freedom Nina is rejecting, to be a real woman. In consequence, Nina scratches her back, rips her skin, breaks her fingernails, etc. She even prints herself in the only similar being around, who happens to be Lily, the Black Swan who can take her place in the stage in a blink of an eye, and Beth, the only being around who reached perfection and drop off. Nina's mother, Erika (Hershey), is most likely the antagonist of this story, for she is the one suppressing her potential with merely love. Inspires her to be conformist and consenting her, instead of letting her go or at least, giving her a little personal space in the bathroom. Hershey should be a good mother, thought.
The most relevant character, after the end, is Beth Macintyre, who happened to be famous and could have given Nina all the answers. But she was too "IN" with her own demons to lead with another person's. When she finds that she's being dumped out of the company, she falls in a depression driven by alcohol and rage that ended showing up a small amount of damage of what a Black Swan can do with a dancer. If Nina would have forgotten about the performance and concerned more about the trap Beth's pride placed on her way, she could have avoid a trap from her own mind. She ends devastated in the hospital (probably crazy, probably killed: you won't hear it from me), but she didn't leave the stage without a warning to Nina, that couldn't be taken seriously because of the ballet maestro and Nina's owner, Thomas Leroy (Cassel): "Make the most of it, Nina! Yup".
Nothing stopped her from her mind deliriums and the unstoppable search of perfection until it was too late, and even then: her dreams turned into wishes, her wishes turned into fantasies, her fantasies turned into nightmares, her nightmares turned into hallucinations, her hallucinations turned into deliriums, and the deliriums drove her mad.
Aronofsky used visual effects lightly, but one of them is in my favorite take from the entire year (even more that the rolling chamber in "Inception"). Luckily, the story doesn't need all the CGI in the world, cause as I said before, the movie talks by its own. You'll see a good thriller, without exhilarating sound effects and with an exhilarating good screenplay. And yet, it would be one of the craziest, sexiest movies you'll see in a while. You'll found a relivable shiver (or a truly terrifying relieve) at the end, when the White Swan flags and the Black Swan break his cage, just to prove the perfection has a high cost and that thrillers like this are a real mind feast on a time when movies like "Final Destination" sell tickets.
So astonishing that I found that the last Oscar season wasn't about The King Speech and Inception, as I thought, but was about the Social Network and Black Swan. And, obviously, it is so strong that I needed to comment about it even half a year after the premier.