Now, in Black Swan, another Oscar contender director Darren Aronofsky explores the dark side of this morbid dedication to performance. This is a ballet melodrama in which it isn’t just the body that is threatened with
desctruction, but also the mind.
Natalie Portman plays the role of Nina, a New York ballerina who’s worked hard to be the best dancer in her company. She’s desperate to play the lead in a new version of Swan Lake, and has a good chance now that the troupe’s prima ballerina (Winona Ryder) has been forced into retirement. The company’s flamboyant artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) believes Nina is perfect for the part of the virginal Swan Queen, who kills herself for love, but he doubts that she has the right stuff for the counter-part of her evil twin, the Black Swan.The latter needs more than mere discipline; it’s about spontaneous, sexual allure. Nina persuades him she has it in her, and the film is an account of how she tries to persuade herself.
Thomas is right though to have his doubts, as Nina is really still a child. Her home is a small apartment she shares with her mother (Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina who both smothers and scolds, biting back the bitterness she feels towards Nina after a less successful career of her own. Nina’s bedroom is filled with cuddly stuffed animals and not at all the domain of the fierce, sexual creature she has been asked to portray. It fairly screams repression, and just adds to her personal issues – secret bulimia, a pathological scratching, tortured bones and tendons. She tells herself this is what she really wants but somehow allows her world to collapse in on her as her mind falters.
I loved this film for the cinematography. The sets are lavish and lush and the acting quite superb. Natalie Portman has clearly seen this as a pivotal movie in her career and gone at it 100%. Ballerinas do have quite
extraordinary bodies, and she has presented to the world the archetypical form for this film. And that cannot be an easy feat. I found it thoroughly watchable.
A side note to this film is its appearance in an internet list that caught my attention, regarding movies never to go and see with your mother. I did mention this to my own mother and having seen the film can understand the reasoning for it. I can only imagine how heart wrenching it must be to watch a sweet young girl decline in the way Nina does in this film. Again it’s the realness of the performance and the not uncommon issues she is facing that might trouble some mothers as they relate it to their own daughter(s).
movie reviews 