What happened to my sweet girl?

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2011)

Wow is the one word reaction I had to Black Swan, a truly dark and surreal tale about the world of ballet from Darren Aronofsky.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a talented young ballerina who get her technique down perfectly, but has a very meek personality. She has a controlling mother (Barbara Hershey) who does not allow her daughter to grow up, with Nina ending up having a young personality and there is a possible history of self-harm. Nina is up for the role of a life time, playing both the White Swan and the Black Swan in Swan Lake. The ballet director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) believes Nina is perfect to play the White Swan but too nice to play the Black Swan. Despite this Nina is cast in the role, but she has to explore her dark side, having an affair with Thomas, have dark images of herself following her and herself bleeding and worrying about another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis) wanting to replace her.
Darren Aronofsky is of course a skilled director and after playing it safe with The Wrestler took a risk again with this ambitious film. Black Swan is a really crazy film, many thinks are going off in this film and it was a schizophrenic experience. Aronofsky has shown with both The Wrestler and Black Swan that he can take something that is light entertainment and turn into something dark and seedy. Aronofsky is not afraid to look at the darker side of life and what it would take to be a ballerina, discipline, staying thin (by any means possible), having affairs, etc and Aronofsky is able to mix dark fantasy with real life. I personally love Aronofsky's use of hand-held camera, giving Black Swan a more intense feeling, using close up and it was great when the camera spins around the actors when their dance. It gives the audience the feeling of what it is like to dance and being in the studio. As the film become more surreal it reminded me of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a film that become very confusing by the third act. A scene I really like is when Nina and Lily are in the club with a coloured strobe light, making the characters look like they pictures as they jerkily move when the light goes on and off. It is very much what it is like in a nightclub and the Chemical Brothers music was fitting.
The acting in the film is great. Of course Portman is a talented actress and it is likely that she will get the Oscar, Jennifer Lawrence will be considered too young by the academy. I like how her character was pretty much like a 13-year-old girl who still needs to grow and get out of her shell. Kunis shows that will the right direction she can be a good actress (she was much better then to her role in The Book of Eli). She was a strange, bad girl, smoking, drinking, taking drugs and acting almost like a femme fatal. The story and relationship between Nina and Lily could have worked if the characters were teenagers, Nina being a naïve young girl being led astray by a more experience girl. Hershey too was good as Nina's mother, a woman using her daughter to live out her dreams and treating her as a doll, dressing her and controlling her life. The relationship is almost like Norman Bates the early years. This follows a long running theme in Afonosky, dysfunctional relationships between a parent and their child, but this time Nina's mum does love her, but goes about it the wrong way. Cassel is effectively creepy as a man who seduces dancers, touches them inappropriately, yet silver tongued.
Clint Mansel is a great composer and he has worked with Aronofsky before. He gave Black Swan an incredible, booming score. He composes his own music with the music of Swan Lake to great affect and my God was it fantastic.
But I do have a problem with the film and that is why the filmmakers did not know which direction they wanted to go. They did not know where to focus it as a grounded tale of a girl going mad, living in her mother's shadow, as a dark horror of someone going through metamorphosis, a tale of a girl being followed by someone trying to take own her live or any of the other themes and ideas in the film. Black Swan needed more focus.