Driven more by style than character, this will alienate some but pays off if you take it all in

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2011)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Nina (Natalie Portman) is a shy, nervous girl whose passion is performing ballet. In the face of stiff competition from more confident, forward girls, she wins the lead role in an up-coming production of Swan Lake in New York City, when demanding instructor Leroy (Vincent Cassel) drops older performer Beth (Winona Ryder) and invites her in. It's from here she becomes friendly with co star Lily (Mila Kunis), a more spirited girl who evokes emotions in her previously untapped. But the better Nina does, the more she is pushed and the more her strive to achieve perfection drives her dangerously over the edge and she finds her sanity waning.
Despite the rave reviews and the numerous awards they've won, I saw neither Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (which makes this film even stranger!) or Black Swan at the cinema, and had to wait to see them on DVD. This may make their scope smaller to me in the eyes of some, since being on 'the big screen' is what the 'big films' of whatever day they're released in most will remember seeing them on. Luckily, Aronofsky, whichever way you look at it, is a director with talent, and he makes films where this manages to shine through in whichever format you see them in. There are a good few who would have missed his smaller, more independent but critically acclaimed effort Requiem for a Dream (which I've never seen!) but The Wrestler managed to be a far more mainstream effort and was an undoubted work of brilliance, one of, if not the, best film of the 00s many claim. But while that worked as a character study of a man adored by loads he doesn't know but seen as greatly flawed by those who are supposed to be closest to him, Black Swan is a film driven more by atmosphere and claustrophobia, or rather an impending and illogical sense of these things. In many ways it is also a character study, of a girl with great untapped talent and potential, whose innocent and sincere determination to be the best at what she does, at odds with her deep insecurity and fundamental lack of belief in herself, pushes her over the edge, but it's delivery, at least at the beginning, is as such that it makes it hard to get into and may alienate some viewers from the off set.
That the performances are so fantastic is for sure a bonus point, Portman in the lead role great as the central protagonist, a Carrie White style character still living with a domineering and controlling mother (Barbara Hershey) who hasn't let her really grow up and experience the world, whose shyness and vulnerability never really seem to go away as she progresses further and has to battle with her mounting delusions, and secondary mentions must go to Cassel as the archetypal slave driving instructor, a man prepared to push his lead star to a nervous breakdown in his quest to get the best out of his play and, more selflessly, her, while co stars Kunis and, in a far more minor role, Ryder also compliment the overall flavour of things. Unlike The Wrestler, it doesn't work as well telling a story as it does being a movie revolving around a sense of style and atmosphere that may be lost on some but which is there if you pay close enough attention. ****