Grim, perturbing and morbidly fascinating goings-on at a ballet school, as the battle for a role in a prestigious play reach new levels of impoverishment.

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2011)

Black Swan begins its tumultuous, turbulent, rampageous descent into all things maddening and unravelling with some mischievous, border-line evil, cackling behind the quaint and elegant sounds of a ballet score which overlies the opening credits. That idea that something rather nasty, even devious or underhand, to a greater extent lurks behind the entire medium made up of magnificence or grace is alluded to as the piece opens; the film going on to depict a chapter in a person's life fraught with madness, hallucination and a brand of professionalism which forces them to alienate themselves from their surroundings. Director Aronofsky's Black Swan is this film; a stupendous thriller covering the getting under of the subject material at hand and the demythifying the norm whilst filtering a very beautiful surface world through a human's paranoid and sexually repressed subconscious.
That human is Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers, a young New York based woman whom works with a ballet group and lives with her mother. As an expansive and adventurous dance number comes to a crashing, crescendo-ridden close post-credits, she wakes up; the seeing of herself in a dream executing an extravagant dance sequence with another performer in full-on garb rounded off with a deep sigh in the here-and-now, a heavy sigh carrying with it an air of regret, as if it were a number she wishes she could envisage herself doing in reality. Nina lives with her mother in an apartment, her designated room carrying with it airs of innocence; of a child-like mentality imbued with pink wallpaper and numerous stuffed toys dotted around, the relationship with her mother Erica, played by Barbara Hershey, very much suggesting one of an infantile nature which has not been allowed to naturally progress and has been reigned in – a somewhat revealing scene in which she suggests she should cut her nails for her suggesting as such.
At her ballet school, the announcement of the performing of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake acts as the catalyst for severe changes to undergo; an effective and workmanlike dancer on in her own right, Nina's part in the play is without question but the specific role she's to play remains mysterious. This decision lies with Vincent Cassel's slimy, egotistical, lecherous dance manager Thomas Leroy; a man whom when we first see him towers over all in an auditorium, an entire practise session pausing for his presence and his reason for being there as he lays out specifics for the upcoming show: a man with an mysteriously sordid back-story to do with an ex-pupil of his looming over his character's proceedings.
Nina's ability sees her one of the shoe-ins for the role of the white swan, but the true chalice lies in the form of the role of the titular black swan; the role within the piece that sees the character therein transform, indeed mutate, from one extreme to another – with it, arriving a more aggressive, more combative and more outlandish array of characteristics that demands dancing skills of similar ilk. Nina eventually undertakes the quest to land said role, but Leroy outlines the changes she needs to undergo; her principal threat to loosing that black swan role in the form of Mila Kunis' Lily, a girl of binary opposition to Nina; a performer whom turns up late for practise in comparison to Nina's diligence to get there early; a person whose carefree attitude is in stark comparison to Nina's precise and measured approach to her dancing and an individual whose answering back and general extroverted philosophy goes against Nina's softly spoken demeanour.
The film is a bleak but stylish and wholly nourishing descent into the rather twisted world of ballet and performance; the ugliness lurking behind that facade of exhibition and beauty and elegance dutifully explored in a thoroughly engaging fashion. Aronofsky litters his films with mirrors; has his characters gaze into mirrors; has them peer at themselves and, on occasion, has their reflections react before peering straight back. Amidst the dance halls lined with glass and the washrooms featuring smaller versions situated above sinks, it is the mirror occupying the entrance hallway to Nina and mother's apartment which gives the greatest clue as to Aronofsky's attempt at getting under the skins of these people though reflective material: said mirror appearing cracked or distorted in its style without having been physically broken; its presence symptomatic of Nina and Lily's arrival there fresh from a night out whose aim for some it was, quite literally, to try and smash Nina's persona so that she may change for the role.
What Aronofsky etches out of his cast, predominantly of the two female leads, is nothing short of rather extraordinary. In regards to Kunis, we observe her part in 2008's Max Payne and that she was out horribly miscast in a role which demanded presence and conviction; a role that required her to exist in a simmering situation with little in the way of remorse to most around her but not shy at attempting to befriend one of those caught up in it if it meant personal gain. Her performance was somewhat nearing the ranks of terrible; here, and granted the short gap between films, what Aronofsky does is have her play near enough a similar role to that of the temptress, albeit filtered through the subconscious of someone else, but having her do so with far more conviction leading one into suspecting it was the fault of the man in charge of her in the debacle that was Max Payne when we observe what she pulls off here. Portman's Oscar win essentially arriving off the back of a role which is all about the ability to fall into a specific character or act; the part of Nina very much about performance and the desire to get into character and wholly infused with that field of performance and bringing to life a complexion - the end result being a rather taut and quite frightening experience worthy of its praise.