Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder, Barbara Hershey
Darren Aronofsky has never been scared to push himself, and his audience, into new and uncomfortable territory. After the unequivocal success of his early films, he decided to throw himself into a highly stylised, epic CGI love story with ‘The Fountain’. He followed up with a stripped down, nuanced ‘cinema vérité’ exploration of a struggling wrestler. And now he has thrown the film community another curveball with ‘Black Swan’, a dark and stylised psychological thriller set in the isolated world of ballet.
Nina (Portman) is a prim and desperately enthusiastic ballerina with the New York City Ballet. She lives with her mother Erica (Hershey), a ballerina who “never quite made it”, but fortunately ended up with a child that she could blame for her failure. Erica is a mother so bristling with passive aggressive, maniacal tendencies that even Hitchcock would tense up in her presence. When Nina is elevated to the most prestigious role in the company, that of Prima Ballerina, by the sexual and totalitarian company boss Thomas (Cassel), Erica can only muster a wincing smile to cover the sting of jealousy. That is more than can be said for the rest of the company, however, as they whisper and shun their new queen like bickering school children.
To add to Nina’s woes, the previous Prima Ballerina, Beth (Ryder), has attempted suicide by jumping in front of a car; and a new ballerina, Lilly (Kunis), has arrived from San Francisco with a lawless, highly sexual dancing style that has Thomas panting like a dog. Nina isn’t given long to fret over these fraying threads on the seams of her dream, as Thomas is already digging away at her prim image, trying to penetrate her dull propriety and illicit some sexuality. Nina is playing the lead in ‘Swan Lake’, and while she was born to play the White swan, she is incapable of exhibiting the dark passion of the Black swan. As the pressure mounts up and Nina is expelled into a world outside her mother’s grasp – a world of loneliness and chaos and sexuality – Nina’s mental control melts away with horrifying and tragic consequences.
As might be expected when an ‘auteur’ makes a ‘genre’ film, there is an endless list of masterpieces that are called to mind while watching ‘Black Swan’. ‘The Red Shoes’ is an obvious example, although Aronofsky claims not to have seen it until late into development; ‘All About Eve’ is a painful depiction of a star’s jealous and unstable backstage breakdown; ‘Belle de Jour’ is a chilling journey through a woman’s discovery of her own dangerous sexuality; and almost everything Polanski ever made seems to have inspired the twitching tension and cataclysmic darkness that underpins this film.
But all this means that, at times, this film feels less like a ‘psychological thriller’ and more like a Media Studies exercise in ‘how to make a psychological thriller’. There are haunting reflections, hazy ‘doubles’, archaic mothers, creeping shadows, shifting timeframes; all the tropes of the genre are carefully checked off the list. Aronofsky gets an A*, but nobody likes a teacher’s pet.
Perhaps I am being too hard. The story holds up and remains cohesive and intriguing throughout (although there are moments when one thinks to oneself “why should I care about this prissy little dancer?”) and the technical accomplishments justify the film’s existence all on their own. Aronofsky has bravely chosen to stick with the unsteady, jolting ‘cinema vérité’ camerawork of ‘The Wrestler’, despite the general assumption that this style of camerawork is the antithesis of the ‘thriller’. This lends the film an unnerving realism, which is complimented by the use of 16mm film (Aronofsky is one of the few remaining stalwarts against the RED camera) and the oppressive, drained landscapes of New York City.
But it is when the dancing begins that Aronofsky really begins to enjoy himself. Aronofsky has collaborated with Benjamin Millepied, a highly respected ballet dancer and choreographer, to choreograph the film, and they have treated the camera as a cohesive member of the routines. The camera swoops and glides and pirouettes around the dancers, creating a kinetic synergy that is quite moving and beautiful. This may not be Aronofsky’s most accomplished or original film, but it is a visceral and visionary take on an exciting and under-explored genre.
Darren Aronofsky has never been scared to push himself, and his audience, into new and uncomfortable territory. After the unequivocal success of his early films, he decided to throw himself into a highly stylised, epic CGI love story with ‘The Fountain’. He followed up with a stripped down, nuanced ‘cinema vérité’ exploration of a struggling wrestler. And now he has thrown the film community another curveball with ‘Black Swan’, a dark and stylised psychological thriller set in the isolated world of ballet.
Nina (Portman) is a prim and desperately enthusiastic ballerina with the New York City Ballet. She lives with her mother Erica (Hershey), a ballerina who “never quite made it”, but fortunately ended up with a child that she could blame for her failure. Erica is a mother so bristling with passive aggressive, maniacal tendencies that even Hitchcock would tense up in her presence. When Nina is elevated to the most prestigious role in the company, that of Prima Ballerina, by the sexual and totalitarian company boss Thomas (Cassel), Erica can only muster a wincing smile to cover the sting of jealousy. That is more than can be said for the rest of the company, however, as they whisper and shun their new queen like bickering school children.
To add to Nina’s woes, the previous Prima Ballerina, Beth (Ryder), has attempted suicide by jumping in front of a car; and a new ballerina, Lilly (Kunis), has arrived from San Francisco with a lawless, highly sexual dancing style that has Thomas panting like a dog. Nina isn’t given long to fret over these fraying threads on the seams of her dream, as Thomas is already digging away at her prim image, trying to penetrate her dull propriety and illicit some sexuality. Nina is playing the lead in ‘Swan Lake’, and while she was born to play the White swan, she is incapable of exhibiting the dark passion of the Black swan. As the pressure mounts up and Nina is expelled into a world outside her mother’s grasp – a world of loneliness and chaos and sexuality – Nina’s mental control melts away with horrifying and tragic consequences.
As might be expected when an ‘auteur’ makes a ‘genre’ film, there is an endless list of masterpieces that are called to mind while watching ‘Black Swan’. ‘The Red Shoes’ is an obvious example, although Aronofsky claims not to have seen it until late into development; ‘All About Eve’ is a painful depiction of a star’s jealous and unstable backstage breakdown; ‘Belle de Jour’ is a chilling journey through a woman’s discovery of her own dangerous sexuality; and almost everything Polanski ever made seems to have inspired the twitching tension and cataclysmic darkness that underpins this film.
But all this means that, at times, this film feels less like a ‘psychological thriller’ and more like a Media Studies exercise in ‘how to make a psychological thriller’. There are haunting reflections, hazy ‘doubles’, archaic mothers, creeping shadows, shifting timeframes; all the tropes of the genre are carefully checked off the list. Aronofsky gets an A*, but nobody likes a teacher’s pet.
Perhaps I am being too hard. The story holds up and remains cohesive and intriguing throughout (although there are moments when one thinks to oneself “why should I care about this prissy little dancer?”) and the technical accomplishments justify the film’s existence all on their own. Aronofsky has bravely chosen to stick with the unsteady, jolting ‘cinema vérité’ camerawork of ‘The Wrestler’, despite the general assumption that this style of camerawork is the antithesis of the ‘thriller’. This lends the film an unnerving realism, which is complimented by the use of 16mm film (Aronofsky is one of the few remaining stalwarts against the RED camera) and the oppressive, drained landscapes of New York City.
But it is when the dancing begins that Aronofsky really begins to enjoy himself. Aronofsky has collaborated with Benjamin Millepied, a highly respected ballet dancer and choreographer, to choreograph the film, and they have treated the camera as a cohesive member of the routines. The camera swoops and glides and pirouettes around the dancers, creating a kinetic synergy that is quite moving and beautiful. This may not be Aronofsky’s most accomplished or original film, but it is a visceral and visionary take on an exciting and under-explored genre.
Posts
No comments :
Post a Comment