THE STORY – Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina whose passion for dance rules every facet of her life. When the company’s artistic director decides to replace his prima ballerina for their opening production of “Swan Lake,” Nina is his first choice. She has competition in newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis), however. While Nina is perfect for the role of the White Swan, Lily personifies the Black Swan. As rivalry between the two dancers transforms into a twisted friendship, Nina’s dark side begins to emerge.
THE CAST – Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey & Winona Ryder
THE TEAM – Darren Aronofsky (Director), Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz & John McLaughlin (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
Ask any random person on the street to name a ballet, and they will likely respond with one of two titles: Christmas staple “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake.” Even people who aren’t fans of ballet have probably heard of “Swan Lake,” given that its fairy tale story and famously stylized choreography (as well as its famous, gender-swapped reimagining by Matthew Bourne) have given it a cultural foothold that most other ballets have struggled to reach in the past century. The ballet’s plot, as described twice in Darren Aronofsky’s psychosexual thriller “Black Swan,” revolves around Odette, a young woman who has been turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer. She can only be fully returned to human form if someone who has never loved before vows to love her forever. She meets a Prince who does, but the sorcerer tricks him by sending an evil double to him. Heartbroken, Odette decides to kill herself. In a stroke of genius, Aronofsky’s film uses the plot of the ballet as a rough outline for its own story about a young ballerina whose already fragile mental state deteriorates further as she rehearses for the ballet’s lead role. In doing so, “Black Swan” takes its audience on a visceral trip through the mind of a dancer, laying bare all the internal and external pressures that come with even this most beautiful, seemingly effortless art form.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman in an Oscar-winning performance) presents as a picture-perfect ballerina, but she’s dealing with some real psychological issues. Nina still lives with her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey, brilliantly walking the fine line between over- and underplaying), a former corps de ballet dancer with the same company for which Nina is now a soloist, has a bedroom decorated all in pink with dozens of stuffed animals, and still speaks in pinched, high-pitch register of a prepubescent girl. Nina dreams of dancing a principal role with the company and gets her chance when the company’s Artistic Director Thomas (the perfectly smarmy Vincent Cassel) decides it’s time for new blood in their upcoming production of “Swan Lake,” which he wants to be as stripped back and visceral as possible. The principal dancer must dance two roles, and while Nina fully embodies the virginal, pure Odette (the White Swan), she doesn’t have any of the performance qualities required to play her evil double Odille (the Black Swan). After a botched audition, Nina visits Thomas privately to try to get the part, but when he goes in for a kiss, she shocks them both by biting him. This gets her the part, but in rehearsals, she’s too focused on perfecting the movement and not enough on embodying the character. As Thomas pushes her, and as newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis, sneakily hilarious in a tricky part) makes herself known to both Thomas and Nina as Nina’s sensual, if imperfect, opposite, Nina’s tightly wound psyche begins to unravel, seeing dark doppelgängers of herself everywhere and scratching at a rash that resembles gooseflesh. Will she be able to break through and give the performance of her dreams?
Every dance film owes a debt to “The Red Shoes,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece on the struggle of a performing artist. Numerous films – from Oscar Best Picture winner “An American in Paris” to early ’00s cheese-fest “Center Stage” – build upon the groundwork laid by “The Red Shoes.” The narrative of having to choose between love and art, its characters’ obsessive quality, and its titular ballet’s uniquely cinematic qualities have all been passed down from dance film to dance film through the decades. “Black Swan” may be the only film since then to attempt to do the same thing as “The Red Shoes,” doubling as an adaptation of a fairy tale and a story about a ballerina dancing a ballet based on that fairy tale. Unlike “The Red Shoes,” however, “Black Swan” has the heart of a grotty haunted house B-movie, from its numerous fake-out jump scares to its gnarly body horror and outré sense of sexuality. Reimagining “Swan Lake” as a horror film is a stroke of genius. Still, the screenplay (by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin, and Andres Heinz from a story by Heinz) also wants to be a dramatic character study of an obsessive artist. The balance in the screenplay is tilted too much toward horror for the film to reach its loftiest goals, but Aronofsky directs it with such verve and technical control that it’s clear that – at least at this point in his career – he’d found the perfect balance between his pursuit of artistic perfection and his more baroque tendencies.
Taking his cue from the screenplay, Aronofsky sets out to make “Black Swan” as visceral and real as possible, stripping away anything that isn’t directly focused on Nina’s perception of herself and the world around her. It’s one of the most successful pieces of subjective filmmaking, putting the audience directly into the lead character’s headspace – and what a freaky place it is! Shooting on grainy Super 16mm film, cinematographer Matthew Libatique gets striking contrasts out of the blinding whites and deep blacks of the film’s color palette. The slinky long takes of Nina and others dancing and rehearsing, with the handheld camera gliding around them, leaving no trace of its existence in the full-length mirrors that cover the rehearsal spaces, only heighten the film’s tension, undergirding every scene with the undeniable sense that something is not quite right with what we’re seeing. The sound mix only further heightens this, with breaths, laughing, heartbeats, and wings appearing on the soundtrack whenever Nina’s psyche fractures further. Clint Mansell’s score interpolates Tchaikovsky’s iconic themes into dark, atmospheric piano plinks and bass strums, as well as a full-on poppers o’clock EDM rave track that plays under a masterfully conceived and edited drug trip scene. The production design is full of mirrors and reflective surfaces, cutting Nina into smaller versions of herself and presenting even more doubles, including some who seem to have minds of their own. The film builds its horror slowly, ratcheting up the tension and gaining momentum steadily as it goes, culminating in a performance sequence as viscerally cinematic as the ballet in “The Red Shoes” in a less fantastical way (until its final seconds), as Nina finally fully embraces her inner black swan.
All this fantastic craft would mean nothing without a great actress in the central role, and Portman delivers. The actress has always allowed the audience to see her work in a way that can push them away, but in “Black Swan,” that quality dovetails so perfectly with the film’s themes that it draws in the audience. The way she pinches her voice to achieve that specific girly register is almost painful to listen to, and it becomes even more so when Nina tries to stand up for herself but has such a lack of self-confidence that her voice can barely register above a whisper. The moment when Nina calls her mom from a bathroom stall, smiling through tears, squeaking out the words “he picked me, Mommy,” after getting cast as the Swan Queen is among the finest moments of Portman’s accomplished career, a moment of total surrender to pure feeling that we get only flashes of elsewhere here, at least until the film’s gonzo last act. It’s not just her vocal work that impresses, though. While she doesn’t quite have the bearing and body control to pass as a prima ballerina to those in the know – thankfully, the scenes where a dance double was used are flawlessly rendered – she uses her physicality in other ways to externalize Nina’s internal struggle. Portman’s natural stiffness becomes an extension of Nina’s repression (both sexual and otherwise), allowing the actress to mirror Nina’s own valiant struggle to break free from her self-imposed cage. When she finally does break free in the film’s last act, Portman lets all control over her body go, throwing her arms around with drunken abandon and even dropping her vocal register, a flash of who Nina could have been had she not gone down this path of pursuing artistic perfection and instead simply lived.
The film’s last act is, in many ways, a technical masterpiece, bringing all of the film’s disparate elements together in a swirling symphony of cinema. The one big problem is that the film doesn’t go quite far enough in showing how Nina embraces her inner black swan until the final performance. Because the screenplay is so committed to its rickety B-horror movie shenanigans, Nina spends most of the film running away from her darker side; even after rolling on drugs with Lily during a night out, she still has neither more self-confidence nor looseness than she did before. When Nina finally lashes out against her doppelgänger and forcefully says that it’s her turn, it’s a cheer-worthy moment (of sorts), but it also comes out of virtually nowhere, with only Nina’s increasingly self-destructive skin-picking and (wholly justifiable) lashing out against her mother to lean on as precursors. What really sells it is Portman’s performance while she prepares for the famous Black Swan coda: Moving her body as though she’s waking up from a long slumber and is feeling her muscles come alive, she walks the backstage wings like a tiger stalking its prey, fully waking just before she has to go onstage when her face contorts into the smile of one possessed with artistic rapture. As Tchaikovsky’s immortal music grows in intensity, the film’s visual effects go into overdrive, making Nina’s transformation into the black swan thrillingly literal. It’s an over-the-top climax that’s utterly in keeping with Aronofsky’s mixture of art-house and B-movie sensibilities. Even if the screenplay doesn’t fully warrant the investment of such an immaculate filmmaking technique, the use of it only makes the film more involving and entertaining. “Black Swan” stands as proof that films have been elevating horror to the level of art for decades, and when they get it right, the results are exhilarating.
