My favorite Aronofsky since Pi and the two are a lot similar...

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2010)

Black Swan goes back to where Aronofsky began. It's very Pi-like. Isolated, urban, with romance or sexuality hoisted on the main character like a threat, leading to psychosis and digging at the skin for salvation. The lead of Pi picks at his head like Nina picks at her back. Plus the old man subway guy that was in Pi seems to return here. The pace of this film is much like Pi, with the actors wearing camera, so their walking sways from side to side. My boyfriend was nauseous from seeing this in the theater and he loved Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and The Wrestler. There was something in this movie that made him sick. That is the magic of it, you are thrown, just like you were into Maximillian Cohen's mind in Pi. The camera work, lack of a soundtrack at parts (toes on pointe and feathers rustling in a disturbing way make up a lot of the non-ballet dancing scenes) and Nina's hallucinations (which some may be real, others not) make for an amazing ride into the subconscious of a ballet dancer and her insulted world.
I was surprised with the amount of sexuality in this film, which makes me believe it won't get Oscar nods because of the lesbian and self-loving imagery, but hopefully the Oscars aren't prudish. I felt the sexuality was dead on as Nina becomes the Black Swan. Her relationship with Lily is both real and fantasy, as Lily ends up a doppleganger of Nina in Nina's mind, the person she needs to be in order to be "perfect" as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. Her world is a harsh one...she is cruel to herself, her ballet producer is a crude man whose teaching includes a healthy dose of sexual harassment and seduction, the only person who reaches out to her over her controlling mom is the person who becomes her understudy and the woman who is "retiring" or the Old Swan (played awesomely by Winona Ryder) calls her a whore and drives her further into psychosis.
I tend to think of the movie as a feminist diatribe. It seems that when a woman is "perfected" as Sylvia Plath put it in the poem Edge, she is dead. I feel this movie stresses how women punish themselves for perfection they can never achieve, unless in death. Though you aren't quite sure if Nina dies in the end, it ends like Pi does with a white out. But the world seems to beat ballerinas into a strange submission though those in the outside world, like the guys Lily and Nina meet in a bar, wouldn't even go see if they had free tickets. Even if they succeed in dance, they only have 15-20 years to prove themselves until they "retire", meaning they are forced to make way for the young girls because the ballet show producers needs some fresh meat to romance. The whole world of Black Swan is much like the fairy tale in the ballet. Nina is seduced by hopes of a career and then her life crashes down around her when she thinks her understudy has seduced her and is trying to take over. Again, you aren't very sure what is real and what isn't. The special effects are very subtle. A blinking painting there, the Black Swan face for a second on a club dance floor...then they get fantastic later on as wings spring from the Swan Queen herself.
I highly recommend this film. It does have some highly sexual content but it is wonderfully shot and very female orientated and ends up being very beautiful. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis shine in this film and if they aren't given awards for their acting, then the world is as sad as the world Black Swan exists in. Yet that world is a lovely dark place.