The Black Swan

“The Black Swan”

Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Directed By: Darren AronofskyWriters: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlinIn Theaters: December 3, 2010 Limited Release
On DVD: March 29, 2011
Box Office: $107.0M
Fox Searchlight 108 Minutes


Rated R

Rosemary’s Baby, The Double, and Psycho are some of the movies that The Black Swan has been compared to. This critic if she had to would compare it to the Red Shoes cause of the hauntingly beautiful torture a ballerina goes through, but I truly believe that this movie has a quality all its own. It would be insulting to Darren Aronoksky’s amazing eye and attention to detail while filming, and to Natalie Portman’s unwavering performance to compare this film to any other. This psychological thriller is truly unique to have been centered around one of the most beloved ballets [Swan lake] and never be boring or unoriginal. Even the modern take on the classic ballet is a masterpiece in the film.
Natalie Portman defies the mundane of what would otherwise be a predictable, unsettling melodrama about an unhinged ballet dancer who goes not so quietly crazy just as her career takes off. Portman’s uncanny empathy for her character, the over-the-top camera angles and story lines of Darren Aronofsky’s are make a outstanding pair. They both have such nuanced insight and intuition to make this movie a stellar most deserving of a best picture nomination. *Spoilers From This Point*
. Portman plays Nina, an utterly, single-minded devoted ballerina dancing with a prestigious New York City ballet company. Her technique is perfect but she lacks the requisite passion that sometimes co-mingles in certain roles. The company’s artistic director named “Thomas” (but pronounced “Tomah”), rewards Nina by casting her as the white and the black swan in his “avant-garde” production of Swan Lake, but only after he attacks her sexually and she bites his lips defending herself in response. Vincent Cassel plays Thomas with a cruel sneer in his upper lip and a leer in his eyes as he challenges Nina to give up her quest for perfection so that she might convincingly portray the evil and seductive Black Swan with the wild abandon he conceives for the role. That he uses his own body against hers to force her to find her strength.
There is a cautionary object lesson in Beth (Winona Ryder), the aging (that is, 28)”The Dying Swan), once-glorious star of the company who’s forced into retirement. All the dancers want to be Beth particularly Nina who defends her at infinitam against the other dancers saying “Margot Fonteyn danced in to her 50s“; when Nina sneaks into the older woman’s dressing room before her star casting is announced, she steals Beth’s lipstick, a pack of cigarettes, and a letter opener, totemic objects that Nina carries as talismans toward her own success. She also uses these totems in her quest to gain her success. But Beth’s tumble from the top to the bottom turns ugly when she won’t go gracefully into retirement. Instead, she causes a scene at a benefit party and then throws herself into New York City traffic, landing in a lonely hospital room where she languishes with ugly, disfiguring and debilitating scars which Nina reacts to as if it will once be her fate. Nina, fascinated by the woman she’s replacing, visits Beth in her hospital room as some sort of weird penance for precipitating the star’s fate, but the visits aren’t instructive so much as increasingly macabre and violent as Nina’s reality begins to shatter. Ryder’s portrayal of the dying swan can leave something to be desired in this film. Maybe the uncomfortable character mirrors her own life to make it all the more uncomfortable and hard to watch. But hey Wynona loves to play Wynona so did we expect anything to different?
Nina’s mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), it seems, was a corps member herself before she stopped dancing to raise Nina. No father is evident, just the suffocating co-dependency of two women who represent different generations of the same dream. Erica both wants Nina to succeed and desperately needs her to fail, so that her daughter will cling to her, imprisoned in the child-like state Erica insists on preserving. Nina’s bedroom is lined with rows of white and pink stuffed animals that stare down at her bed, and every night, she goes to sleep with the tinny music box sounds of “Swan Lake” that her mother sets in motion to soothe her. Erica intrudes on Nina’s privacy, checking the ever-worsening rash that blooms across her daughter’s back, chiding her for mutilating herself and at the same time, helping Nina hide her wounds. When Nina is cast in the lead role in Swan Lake, Erica doesn’t set out to sabotage her success, but willingly abets Nina’s fast downward spiral when it begins. It is never clear though through my eyes weather what Nina’s mother is how Nina sees her what she is really like.
The real agent of Nina’s downfall is the woman who might otherwise be her savior or rather Black Swan to Nina’s white . Lily (Mila Kunis) arrives in the company from LA full of self-confident sexuality and the distinctly unballet-like nature of the west coast. Nina catches a glimpse of her first on a subway, distracted from her own image in its Plexiglas windows by Lily’s hair and the headphones she wears. But Lily’s laxity proves a refreshing counter-balance to a ballet world in which young women are wound tight, can’t eat, throw up what they do get down, and like Nina, are so disciplined to be perfect that they have no lives outside their dancing.
Lily, the film’s own black swan, loves sensuality and sexuality in equal measure. After she and Nina get off to a rocky start, Lily visits Nina at home, shocking both her and Erica. Nina impulsively goes to a bar with Lily, where she’s persuaded to take ecstasy that Lily insists will just relax her and only last for two hours, “most.” Tempted by her desire to be free of her mother, and by Thomas’s insistence that she “touch herself” as homework to help her loosen up, Nina lets Lily drug her cocktail and gets very uninhibited indeed. The two women flirt with men who are deeply disinterested in ballet—to Nina’s shock, since the art forms her entire world—then dance together wildly in a scene shot in pink light and edited frenetically to represent Nina’s descent into drug-induced ecstasy. The evening ends when Lily makes a pass at Nina in a taxi, and Nina brings her home, to the shock and dismay of Erica, who tries to batter down her bedroom door while the two young women have very wild, hot, and explicit sex.
The sex scene is the film’s pivot point, as it demonstrates how much Nina represses for her art, and how passionate indeed she can be. High as a kite, Nina won’t stand for her mother’s interdictions, and pulls Lily into her bedroom, where they rip off one another’s clothes and practically swallow each other’s tongues. The scene reveals that other side of the carefully controlled artist is a young woman of painful depth and desire, who revels in just the kind of passion Thomas has been so eager to induce. But the next morning, things go quickly awry. Lily is gone, but the pole Nina uses to keep her bedroom door propped closed hasn’t been disturbed. Nina wakes hung-over and late for rehearsal, where she finds Lily already in costume, performing in her role. Immediately, Lily becomes a palpable threat to Nina’s ascendancy, and when Nina refers to their evening together, Lily accuses her of having a “lezzie wet dream,” and denies that anything happened. From there, Nina’s sanity teeters ever closer to the brink, and Aronofsky plays even more fast and loose with what’s real for her and what’s real for us.
From the film’s beginning, moments that seem true are suddenly proven false.
In the film’s climactic scene, Nina seems to kill Lily in a violent rage, shattering her dressing room’s full-length mirror with her rival’s head and then dragging her body onto the cold tile of her bathroom floor. When Lily’s blood seeps under the door, Nina covers it with a towel and goes off to triumphantly perform the second act of Swan Lake, where she nails her performance as the black swan with passion and rage, murderous in her seductress’s make-up. But when she returns to her dressing room to dress for the ballet’s third and final act, Lily comes knocking on her door to compliment Nina’s performance. The body in the bathroom is gone and so is the blood. Nina redresses herself in her white swan costume, but as she pulls on her white feathers, she finds in her own abdomen the seeping red wound she thought she’d inflicted in Lily’s. With morbid fascination and a strange glint of triumph, she retracts the shard of broken mirror she seemed to have used to kill her enemy. As she returns to the stage to finish the ballet exultantly, we’re not sure if this, too, is a hallucination. The white swan falls to her death and Nina falls to the mattress that catches her behind the set, where her fellow dancers and Thomas surround her, extolling her glory and her talent. He calls her “little princess,” the affectionate but diminishing name he once used for Beth (just as Lily predicted he would), then notices with dismay that her white costume is marred by a spreading stain of very red blood. But as she lies there, apparently dying, Nina says both “I was perfect” and “I felt it,” fulfilling her own expectations and Thomas’s wish.
I really enjoyed this movie to the fullest. It was a unique thriller settled around a familiar tale. I personally give this movie 3 out of 5 stars but give it an extra star for how fantastic Natalie Portman performance was.
　Favorite Quote: "You had a lezzie dream about me?" lily
    Awards: Best Actress winner Natalie Portman at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes