BLACK SWAN (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Darren Aronofsky
Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey,
Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, Benjamin Millepied
Darren Aronofsky's portrait of a dancer cracking up begins with a dream in which Natalie Portman as ballerina Nina Sayers imagines herself in a strange version of "Swan Lake". She wakes up (or does she?), catches the train to the studio, and after a series of misdirections and red herrings, finds she's landed the lead in "Swan Lake". Obsessed with perfection, goaded by a domineering choreographer and fawned over by her suffocating mother, she's pushed to the edge of madness, and over it. She has nowhere else to go. This is like a horror movie and a backstage melodrama, "Showgirls" and "The Red Shoes", a hallucination and a reflection on what defines an artist, all rolled into one. Which makes for kind of a crazy movie, but maybe not that far off from the way somebody as compulsively driven and emotionally fragile as Nina might view the punishing, hypercompetitive world of professional ballet. If nothing else, Portman and Aronofsky both take enormous risks, especially with the physical metamorphoses Nina undergoes as the dark side of her role takes over. Winona Ryder, the actress Portman more or less replaced as Hollywood's favorite dark-eyed ingenue, plays the dancer Portman's character replaces at the ballet, a twisted example of art imitating life, and a morbidly fascinating exercise in cinematic masochism.
