Feathers

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2010)

I came to this with high expectations, and about half of the way through the film I started shuffling my feet, shifting, grimacing, and muttering "sheesh!" under my breath. The film is about as lacking in nuance as Nina is lacking in sensuality. And heavy handed on the symbolism. The story could have been such a good one! Unfolded with so much subtlety.
A young, virginal girl, uptight and perfectionist, cracks under the strain of performing as prima ballerina in Swan Lake, under the demanding glare of her trainer and the smothering influence of a mother who infantilizes her. That ghastly pink bedroom. She must learn to convey the sensuality and evil of the Black Swan in the ballet as well as the fragility and innocence of the White Swan, into which she has been turned (through a curse) in both legend and in worldly ambition. She must learn, in effect, what she has never known-- sexual passion, and to this extent the movie was fairly good. Dancing and sex aren't so anxiously associated for no reason.
However, it wasn't clear to me why choreographer chose this brittle virgin for the part, taking an enormous risk in an enormous spotlight when it was clear that she wasn't up to her sensual counterpart, that she was increasingly unstable, and I got tired of the constant rehearsals where this was pointed out. SPOILER: the moment we've been waiting for is magnificent, and magnificently portrayed by.... / / / / a metamorphosis on stage where she literally turns into a great black bird: the itching she feels and the scratches she tries to cover up are in fact the passionate nature she represses. But the filmmaker insisted on bludgeoning us with horror-film clichés and violence ad nauseam (literally... we see her vomit three times, suffer hallucinations where she is ripping her skin off, stabbing someone with a shard of glass, watching while a former ballerina gouges her face with a nail file, etc. etc.). The horror genre has already been there done that with the clichés about the distortions in the mirror, the blood in the bathroom sink, the startling appearance of a reflection or worse. None of this needed to be so over the top or so derivative. The mother and the cruel fellow dancers was enough. I prefer magic realism to horror. It's an entirely different approach to film, and it was done to so much better effect in The Fountain. Best Picture? HARDLY!!