LUCIDMEDIA

Audiences searching for subtlety and a strict adherence to realism will want to stay far away from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The film is a melodrama and like most of the director’s work revels in themes, emotions, and images that are both evocative and gloriously larger than life. In many ways the movie represents a synthesis of everything the filmmaker done to date combining the bombastic style, psychological collapse, and shock tactics of Pi and Requiem For A Dream with the existential quandaries of The Fountain, as well as the backstage drama and subjective character study of The Wrestler. It also has to be considered Aronofsky’s finest work to date even if it suffers somewhat from the overwrought storytelling and occasionally cardboard characterizations that has plagued the filmmaker from the beginning of his career.

Natalie Portman stars as a long-suffering ballet dancer plucked from the sidelines to play the lead in a new production of Swan Lake. Like many ballet dancers, Portman’s character has sacrificed a great deal of her physical and emotional growth for her craft and perhaps much more than any healthy adult should. Her mother (a never-better Barbara Hershey) was a ballerina in her youth and seems to have infantilized her daughter so that her long lost dancing dreams can be fulfilled. Portman is trapped in a perpetual adolescence and her fragile emotional state is stretched to the breaking point by the pressures associated with the lead role, the advances of her sleazy director (Vincent Cassel), and a sudden unexpected sexual attraction to a new dancer (Mila Kunis). Her mind starts slipping from the first scene and when stress and haunting hallucinations combine forces a happy ending seems all but impossible.

The film is a fairly classical melodrama brilliantly intertwined and mirrored with the narrative of the Swan Lake ballet at its the centre. Natalie Portman spent 10 months training for the role and delivers what is sure to be the performance of her career. Portman’s often cold porcelain exterior has hindered her credibility in many roles (ahem, Star Wars?), but suits this character perfectly. She’s required to embody an intense emotional state for the bulk of the running time as well as master complicated choreography. She manages both masterfully and should deservingly win a few Best Actress awards this year. The rest of the cast provides strong support from Hershey’s creepily passive-aggressive mother, to Cassel’s charismatically creepy director, Kunis’ manipulatively sexual rival, and Winona Ryder’s wounded former star. Aronofsky has a gift for casting (no one else would have thought Marlon Wayans could actually act in Requiem For A Dream) and surrounds Portman’s towering central performance well.

Black Swan is undeniably a strange movie that somehow manages to be a lurid psychological horror movie in the David Cronenberg mold, a backstage expose of the physically painful and draining craft of ballet, and a balls out hanky-holding melodrama simultaneously. There is perhaps a little too much going on at once and that combined with an intense dramatic score by Clint Mansell and vividly expressive cinematography by Matthew Libatique can often feel like too much of a good thing. But it says a great deal about Darren Aronofsky’s overreaching talent that he’s able to keep all the balls he’s juggling in the air for most of the running time. Perhaps the most logical point of comparison is Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, to which The Black Swan owes a great debt in it’s depiction of a warped and occasionally torturous relationship between a ballerina, her director, and their creation. Black Swan plays like a sped up, sexed up, and intensified modernization of The Red Shoes that’s only failing lies in the fact that the heightened and lovingly melodramatic style of storytelling it employs is just slightly out of date.

But while Darren Aronofsky may have stretched his ambitions just a little too far with this film, it doesn’t mean that the final product is a muddled mess. Quite the contrary, Black Swan is one of the most exhilarating and intense cinematic experiences of 2010. This is a film to experience, examine, and debate regardless of whether or not all the pieces fit together. This type of movie can only be made by a filmmaker trying to push all of his acquired skills to a higher level and even if the results aren’t perfect, it’s always fascinating to watch him try.