Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake is based on old Russian folk tales and German legends. It tells the story of a princess whom an evil sorcerer turns into a swan. As the story goes, the only thing that can turn her back is if she finds true love. I guess it’s a sort of genetic inverse of the prince as a frog story. If there is a lesson to be learned from or a social motivation behind the crafting of these zoophilic, love restoring humanity stories, then it is lost on me. But, for whatever reason, fairy tales tend to have some creepy, horrific undercurrents, and Swan Lake is no exception. As the story goes on, the swan does meet a prince, and he does fall in love with her, but the sorcerer tricks the prince by disguising his daughter as a dark version of the swan and having her seduce him. When the prince gives in to the seduction the white swan is doomed to be a swan forever. Upset with this unfortunate turn of events, the white swan and the prince kill themselves. Early on in Black Swan Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the head of a large ballet company, briefs his dancers on the particulars of their next production. They are going to put on Swan Lake, an overdone classic, sure; but they’re going to make it new. This version is going to be “stripped down and visceral”. We get no real sense of this unique vision of his throughout the course of the film, but as things progress, as his choice to play the duel role of the black and white swan Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) struggles to perfect the two different dancing styles inherent to the part, we start to realize that he wasn’t necessarily talking about the production that we see come together in the film, but the film we are watching itself. Nina is pure and virginal, a technically proficient dancer, a perfectionist. She is the perfect choice for the role of the white swan. But the loose, passionate, sexual nature of the black swan eludes her. Enter a new rival ballerina named Lily (Mila Kunis). She is everything that Nina is not, and soon they enter into a dance of conflict and connection. Here, in this new stripped down and visceral version of Swan Lake we get a girl who is very much trapped within the limitations of the white swan, there is an evil sorcerer controlling her, and a dark mirror of herself undercuts every one of her efforts; but here in this modern retelling there is no prince. There is no way to break the spell. And the destructive consequences of that loss become even more horrific than the fairy tales of the past.
This is a film about passion, dedication, obsession, and how the lines between them can become blurred. Nina is a dancer who takes her role very seriously. So much so that her focus on perfection overtakes not only her life, but also her perceptions. Black Swan has a lot in common with some of director Darren Aronofsky’s past films, and he’s well suited to handling the material. Nina shares a lot with the protagonist of Aronofsky’s debut film Pi, a mathematician whose sanity slowly corrodes due to his obsession with discovering some sort of unifying life equation. The ramping up of the tension as Nina lets the pressure of being the featured dancer consume her mirrors the rising tension as the protagonists of Requiem for a Dream dip further and further into the destructive oblivion of addiction. The world of ballet is presented in the same gritty, documentary way that the world of small time professional wrestling was in The Wrestler. The way this film is constructed and presented owes a lot to those Aronofsky films that have come before it, and it seems like this could very well be the culmination of what he’s been working toward. At the very least, Black Swan is certainly his most artistically ambitious film since his problem plagued production of The Fountain.
The center of this film is the character of Nina. It is her we follow, it is through her eyes that we experience the world of ballet, and it is through her eyes that we perceive all of the other characters. Because of this, the very foundation of this film is the performance of Natalie Portman. I would venture to say that this is the most important role of her career, and she rises to the occasion admirably. Portman is an actress whose performances I’ve often found to be as good or as bad as the director who she is working with. Teaming with Aronofsky she shines. Like the central character of Odette in Swan Lake, Nina is turned into a swan. In the ballet the transformation is mystical and very literal, but here it is much more metaphorical. Nina is imprisoned not by a mystical spell but by pressure from her doting and overbearing mother. Portman’s bedroom is covered in pink and frills and stuffed animals to the point of oppression. Her mother watches her every move, dresses her, and grooms her like a life-sized doll. She is under constant pressure to be pure, virginal, a “sweet girl”. Any slight move away from this archetypical princess persona is met with hysterics. We follow Nina as she tries to hide in her own apartment. As she tries to bar bathroom and bedroom doors by pushing objects in front of them because they have no locks. In the fairy tale it is only love that can set Odette free of her swan form. Here the recipe seems to be sexuality, independence, vice; anything that we think of as being related to adulthood. This stripped-down, more visceral take on things is far too cynical to put its faith in love. Instead we get the emphasis put on sex; and Nina’s formerly rigid and puritanical life starts to chafe against a bubbling undercurrent of sexual tension as she’s pressured by Thomas to let go and learn to become the black swan as well as the white. Nina’s internal struggle is written on Portman’s face every second that she appears on screen. The tension in her posture and movements is constant. She lost a considerable amount of weight for the film and the results is a stick thin body of rippling, lean muscle under too little flesh that Aronofsky’s camera constantly lingers over. The same way that you can see emotion bubbling under the surface of Portman’s facial expressions, you can also see the spasming of the muscles under her skin. Her face is angular, her limbs gaunt and birdlike. Even when not aided with computer-generated flourishes it seems as if she is constantly struggling to literally not become a bird. This is The Machinist, The Pianist level weight loss for a film role. And clearly, Portman is actually performing much of the ballet in this film, at least from the waist up. It’s apparent that she poured herself into this part and she deserves a lot of recognition for how far she went to make sure all of this worked. I can’t imagine this film being nearly as effective as a whole without the level of dedication that Portman brought to it.
The rest of the characters that we are introduced to are villains to varying degrees, perhaps none more so than the tyrannical head of the ballet company played by Vincent Cassel. He runs his company like a pimp does a stable of call girls, using insults and intimidation to control their actions. He always asks for more than the ballerinas can give, and degrades them when they predictably fall short of his unrealistic expectations. He has a reputation for making girls sleep with him for parts, and he takes every opportunity he can to seduce Nina when she is at her most vulnerable moments. His office and his apartment are both decorated in stark black and white, no other colors visible. They more resemble the lair of a comic book villain than they do any real room we’ve ever been in. I could see Cassel’s character in this picture at home standing next to the great Disney villains. He’s a smug mixture of Anton Ego and Cruella DeVille. He acts as the devil on Nina’s shoulder, always pushing her to give in to her base desires and become the black swan. The imagery is so blatant that we see him at times watching her from the side of the stage, bathed in red light. Subtlety isn’t even considered in the crafting of this screen villain and Cassel appropriately hams up the sleaze and makes no attempt at humanizing Leroy.
Similarly, Barbara Hershey is an absolute monster as Nina’s controlling mother. Her face looks rocky and craggy, like Benjamin J. Grimm in a wig. The way she leers at her daughter makes her appear as if she could turn into a demon at any second. The way she obsesses over her daughter, the way she explodes at any diversion from expected behavior, it makes her a ticking time bomb that heavily adds to the constant building of tension that happens throughout the film. Hershey should be given credit for the courage of the performance. She is completely willing to be despicable and ugly.
Kunis’ character is more of an enigma than the others, but she immediately enters into an antagonistic relationship with Nina. We are introduced to her alongside the imagery of mirrors and reflections. We go from a dark reflection of Portman’s face in the window of a subway train to a glimpse of Lily in the next car back. She is dressed in all black, her face is obscured by brown hair, and her frame is slight and identical to Nina’s. We are very pointedly made to be confused. Is this Portman playing another role or are we seeing someone else? The next time we see her she is showing up late to auditions. She is a freewheeling, devil may care, pain in the ass from the very beginning. She interrupts and ruins Nina’s audition; she ruins her big moment of being presented as the Swan Queen by loudly laughing. She smirks and giggles at every inconvenience she hoists upon other people, seemingly flirting with the entire world around her and coasting through life on charm alone. And when she takes an interest in Nina we never really know her motivations. When she tries to tempt her with drugs, dancing, and sex is it just an attempt at getting the frigid princess to open up? Or is she trying to sabotage her and steal her part? The ambiguity entices and obsesses Nina. She sees Lilly everywhere. She sees her face on Lilly’s body. Lilly becomes the embodiment of everything that Nina feels she can never be, and everything that Thomas wants from her. Compared to what Portman has to shoulder, Kunis isn’t asked to do much more than just be herself, but she has clearly also dropped a considerable amount of weight for her role, and she does what she can to impress with the material given to her.
The further we get into the film the more of an exaggerated experience it becomes. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to Nina’s day-to-day life. She seems pretty uptight and driven, she’s closer to her mom than most girls her age, her boss seems pretty intense, and her job looks like it can be very stressful. But there’s little indication that there’s anything out of the norm going on. After she gets the lead in the ballet and after Lily enters into her life, things start to get a little crazier. The film takes on a melodramatic fairy tale feel for most of the second act. Then, as Nina’s desires and anxieties increase in intensity, her daydreams and double takes start to become full on waking nightmares. There is lots of bleeding and wounds. Nina cracks toenails by practicing too hard; she nervously scratches bloody rashes onto her back during her sleep. But then she gets other, more serious wounds. They appear, suddenly and horrifically, and then disappear just as quick. She starts to take on the physical appearance of a swan, at first in brief flashes, and then in a full-on freaky horror show. The more Portman gives in to her urges and her animal tendencies trying to prepare herself for the role of the black swan the more her feral urges affect her physically. If the first act is a naturalist tale of a girl in a high-pressure situation, and the second is a fairy tale about a trapped princess, then the third is a full on horror film. Her hallucinations and transformations would look right at home taking place in a werewolf film; the brutality of the blood and violence in her visions ramps up to the level of a slasher film. The movie builds and builds, ramping up the tension and making you question what is real and what isn’t. It pokes you and prods you. It lets you know that horrible things are imminent and that you don’t know when it’s all going to spiral out of control. And then when things finally do reach a climax the film relishes the chaos and rockets you towards its inevitable conclusion with gleeful abandon.
The cinematography of the film is all designed to engage the viewer with the experience of being Nina. The dancing sequences are shot to feature the performers, not the dancing. The shots are handheld and pulled in close. The focus is on the straining muscles of the ballerinas, the sweat on their brows. The camera swirls around the stage alongside the dancers, never pulling back to take in the beauty of the dance or the complexity of the choreography. We are engaged in the motion. We aren’t gawking at the performances; we’re a part of them. Several times we get a shot where the camera follows Portman around just over her shoulder. We’re put directly into her shoes. We experience things the same way that she does. Aronofsky used this same shot to great effect in The Wrestler. Several times we followed Mickey Rourke’s character from the backstage environment, through the curtain, out into his adoring audience, and into the wrestling ring throughout that film. The over the shoulder shot is then used again when Rourke has to take a job at a grocery store. We follow him through the loading dock, around the back halls of the store, and out to the deli counter where he is greeted not by adoring fans but by demanding customers. It’s an effective juxtaposition that puts us in Rourke’s shoes and makes us feel his longing for the spotlight. The shot here is used for a sort of reverse effect. We first follow Portman around during her nerve-wracking audition process, then as she sneaks around her apartment trying to hide from her mother, then when she is rolling on ecstasy and trying to find her way out of a dance club. She is tense and awkward through each of these scenes, she stomps around nervous and glaring, looking like a space alien unnerved and confused by our world. The shot is then repeated at the end as we follow her from her dressing room, through the backstage area, and out onto the stage where she performs. Here we get the big performance last instead of first. The shot showed us how mundane and disappointing Rourke’s life had become in The Wrestler; in this film it is repeated to show us the opposite. It makes us understand how every moment of Nina’s life is just as intense and nerve wracking as a big performance. It makes us feel how totally she has let her focus on ballet take over her mind and her life.
This film was just what I needed right when I needed it. I could relate its extended build and intense climax to the way the film year played out for me. All year the anticipation to see exciting film built and built, through the empty spring, the disappointing summer, and into the mediocre fall. One good film would crop up here or there, poking and prodding me with the tease of filmic satisfaction, keeping me engaged, but keeping me anticipating when the really good stuff would arrive. And now, in the last month of the year, all of the studios throw out their Awards season hopefuls rapid fire, at the same time, creating a hallucinatory blur of interesting imagery on par with the surreal insanity of the climax of this film. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more wait, now it is all on top of me, starting with Black Swan. This film feels very wintery to me with its bright whites and its stark blacks mirroring the snow and perpetual night of winters in Chicago. My walk out of the theater was onto frozen streets and sidewalks twinkling with the glow of white Christmas lights, and it felt like just the right scenery to be walking into while humming Tchaikovsky and thinking back on all that I saw. When I think of Black Swan I will think of December. Of cold weather, long nights, Christmastime, Oscar season. A lot of people look forward to watching The Nutcracker every Christmas, from now on I could see myself watching Black Swan.
This film was just what I needed right when I needed it. I could relate its extended build and intense climax to the way the film year played out for me. All year the anticipation to see exciting film built and built, through the empty spring, the disappointing summer, and into the mediocre fall. One good film would crop up here or there, poking and prodding me with the tease of filmic satisfaction, keeping me engaged, but keeping me anticipating when the really good stuff would arrive. And now, in the last month of the year, all of the studios throw out their Awards season hopefuls rapid fire, at the same time, creating a hallucinatory blur of interesting imagery on par with the surreal insanity of the climax of this film. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more wait, now it is all on top of me, starting with Black Swan. This film feels very wintery to me with its bright whites and its stark blacks mirroring the snow and perpetual night of winters in Chicago. My walk out of the theater was onto frozen streets and sidewalks twinkling with the glow of white Christmas lights, and it felt like just the right scenery to be walking into while humming Tchaikovsky and thinking back on all that I saw. When I think of Black Swan I will think of December. Of cold weather, long nights, Christmastime, Oscar season. A lot of people look forward to watching The Nutcracker every Christmas, from now on I could see myself watching Black Swan.
