Black smarm

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2011)

This is a berserk combo of Polanski's Repulsion and The Red Shoes, with a dash of All About Eve thrown in. Aronofski is one of the greatest available hacks working today in movies. Having once seen his feature-length fortune cookie, the New Aged The Fountain, one entertains the certainty that this director will never give a truly heartfelt film, but will twist everything into false spirituality, unless one buys such spiritual obfuscation.
The camera work is superlative. It's the best thing in the film, surpassing even Nathalie Portman who is excellent and dubious, given such a defaming concoction concerning ballerinas. And I say that because once the instructor of the company appears early in the film, this has a jarring effect on matters of true class and virtuoso muddle; or later, another teacher who shows her how to make her hands fluctuate displays a magnificent back (we do not see her face), but the director opts for the grim choice of making it rhyme with Portman's itching back. These two appearances are the only anchoring moments for the script's absurd choices, at least as long as the action takes place in a corps and is not just a pretext of a frame.
I will pass the lesbian scene which levels wildly things down and exposes the mix and match approach.
Even the black and white design after a while passed from grim to tiresome to finally naive.