Don't let Black swallow up White

Rating: 10/10 (7 March 2011)

Tchaikovsky composed one of his most beautiful musics for that old tale in which a prince will come to free the white swan who is a princess but the prince will fall in love with the adventurous and enterprising black swan and that will cause the death, the suicide of the white swan. Charming Princes are no longer what they used to be: they want to choose their princesses. Princes have been liberated from simple predetermined stories, especially when there is an ugly black duckling in the flock.
The cruelty and the difficulty of the choreography is that the same dancer is supposed to be both the white and the black swans. Two styles, two genres, two universes that are so antagonistic and so mutually hostile, that it leads to a drama every night. If the dancer identifies with that impossible and schizophrenic situation it is more than a drama, it becomes a tragedy.
The genius of this film is to invest and embed the dancer in a personal situation that leads to death in a way or another. She is the daughter of a dancer who stopped dancing at the age of twenty-eight when she got pregnant, without a father and twenty-eight is old for a dancer. She never was anything but a member of the chorus line. She carries her daughter at arm's length into realizing the dream she has never been able to realize herself: to become the Swan Queen. She supports her, helps her, takes care of her in the most stifling way imaginable.
She thus stifles in her any kind of personal libido, love instinct. That makes the daughter awkwardly constantly scratch her shoulders. But when she starts embodying the Janus double-face Sawn Queen, the darkest impulses surge up and find their way out in a fantasy-driven nightmare. She explodes in unsatisfied or self-satisfied sexual impulses. She develops a strong hatred for her body-double, a body-double which is normal practice with ballet stars.
The worst is till to come because her mother who wanted her to be what she herself has not been able to be is also the one who wants to prevent her daughter to do what she has not herself done, hence to succeed better than her. This conflict between the mother and the daughter is also schizophrenic. The dancer can identify perfectly with the paranoid psychotic Swan Queen and live the fate of the white swan right to the bitter end of its death.
The music is the most beautiful music you will ever hear but do not get trapped by the poisonous syrup that flows from the notes. The candy is laced with ecstasy if you are lucky, more probably with arsenic if you are really lucky, because then you can evade this unbearable world. And that is a phenomenal liberation, to die when the audience in the house is frantically calling for you after the show.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU