“Black Swan”—Dancing in the In-Between
This spellbinding movie, routinely described as a psychological thriller, is not to everyone’s taste but I absolutely loved it: dancing around the thin membrane between a fantasy/dream world and reality. Starring Natalie Portman as Nina, the beautiful but fragile ballerina who wishes to be the prima ballerina of Swan Lake, the movie opens with a dream sequence from this famous ballet. Evil Rothbart envelops the White Swan in his arms, but Nina wakes up in her room, a child’s bedroom of stuffed animals with a classic music jewelry box of a spinning mechanical ballerina twirling around.
In some ways this is not only a story about a ballerina who is striving for perfection in a severe and ruthless competition among other talented ballet dancers. It is also a story that combines not only Hans Christian Anderson’s “Red Shoes” about a girl who cannot find balance in her life because of her obsession to dance, but also “Glass Menagerie” which portrays the suffocating, self-destructive mother who lives through her daughter, wounding both.
Without giving away the ending, “Black Swan” is about vulnerability and strength, the virginal and the sexual, dual sides of personality and ego. Nina’s alter ego is Lily (played very cleverly by Mila Kunis), as beautiful as she is but more daring and more sensuous. Her back is tattooed with black wings, not exactly subtle, but visually artistic. Both young women are simultaneously attracted to and threatened by each other. Cinematography emphasizes this point with flashes of Portman’s face substituting for Kunis’s in several pivotal scenes.
There are a few cinematic touches that are over the top and could have used more explanation. A wall of paintings, for example, in Nina’s mother’s room are surreal, becoming animated—mouths and eyes moving. The viewer is not sure if these paintings are of Nina or her mother, whose own lackluster ballet career she angrily ended when she became pregnant. The mother, portrayed with terrifying subtlety by Barbara Hershey, dominates and infantilizes Nina as much as the mother in “Glass Menagerie”. Her own wounds are deepened in her daughter, both psychologically and physically.
“Black Swan’s” tale of hallucination, obsession and sexual repression is utterly overpowering from the very first dream sequence in the film. For me, at any rate, “Black Swan” was a metamorphosis encompassing a downward trajectory of frightening innocence and loss of self.
Celeste Wahl
Black Swan is a film where love, sex, jealousy are plopped into a convoluted Hitchcockian thriller
bordering on horror. Portman was superb in her portrayal of the poor young dancer feeling the pressure of her insecurities, as was Mila Kunis, her nemisis. A reel or two too long… Aronofsky’s
Requiem for a Dream’s descent into madness was handled the same – way only a bit more creatively.
Eugene
Good commentary on a movie that held my attention from beginning to end…The White Good versus the Evil in Black permeates the movie…even the sexual energy is the goody 2 shoes white and the erotic black…The music added to the intensity of the movie…I strongly recommend the movie for all but the faint of heart…
Liz
Natalie Portman was amazing, as usual. The movie itself could have been so much better as the second half was quite melodramatic with horror movie gimmicks and surrealism that did not move the plot forward. The character, Lily, was a great juxtaposition to Nina without being her complete opposite. The character development overall was much more nuanced than the schlocky scenes that show Nina losing it.
I throughly enjoyed the costuming and sets.
susie berteaux
I like the evaluation and comments on this movie. It’s descriptions are quite accurate and helped me understand the movie and what it was trying to say/show. The comparisons to Red Shoes and Glass Menagerie helped to explain a lot to me, so it might help the reader of this blog want to see the movie and understand it better, too.
I guess I just wasn’t in the mood to like this movie.
I think this is good evaluation that described the movie well and the reader should be able to decided whether they really want to see the movie or not from this evaluation.