I wrote this for Velvetparkmedia.com, but I’m cross-posting it here because sometimes I get nervous about all the words of mine that are floating around out there beyond my reach. Ignore it if you’ve already read it!
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Darren Aronofsky’s new film Black Swan asks many questions, but they all fold and flourish into one: how far is too far? As the blossoming star of a production of Swan Lake, ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) follows her art and passion to the edge of sanity, and possibly beyond. That’s a fascinating enough premise, but Black Swan offers much more. The film itself rushes headlong to the precipices of illusion, camp, horror, and every sort of sensory delight. Its triumph is that it goes only just that far — far enough to thrill but not to fall.
I’m not going to comb over the plot of Black Swan, because the plot is no more or less important than the cinematography, soundtrack, acting, lighting, and every other element that makes a movie visionary. For me, that’s really the key: Aronofsky gets his clear, strong vision across, so effectively that you’re not quite sure what’s happened to you but you’re pretty sure you liked it. That delicious disorientation is what Nina herself experiences. She’s not exactly a reliable narrator, so it’s impossible to say what really happens in the movie. It’s almost irrelevant to say what’s real, because a Black Swan delusion is much richer and infinitely more rewarding than the everyday truth.
"Rich" is not a big enough word for the visuals of this film. Exhortations such as "sumptuous" and "dazzling" apply but don’t quite describe — you really have to see it to believe it. From the careful control of the black-and-white costumes and sets to the explosion of sound and sight that is Nina’s final performance, Black Swan floods your senses and fills your mind, daring you to breathe or move. This is what the medium of film aspires to: a conquering, a transporting, a fullness — a complete life that is completely different from yours.
That flung-open window into the life of a dancer is a big part of my appreciation for Black Swan. I’ve never wanted to be a ballerina. Grace and poise aren’t exactly salient characteristics of mine, and there’s music in my soul but not in my shoes. But I’ve always admired professional dancers, in part because I’m stunned by the agony of their art. No matter how good you are or how hard you work, physical pain and the inevitable heartbreak of aging are always waiting in the wings. Black Swan exposes that brutality and even relishes it — this is the price, it suggests, of transcendence. The only way out of the physical form is through anguish, and when Nina gets there, she’s bloodied and bruised but glowing and alive.
Dancers (or at least the cinematic version of them) do seem to have cornered bliss, in the form of that brief glimpse of perfection when all the elements come together. The body moving through space suddenly also gives form to rhythm and time, floating on the upswing of a violin bow and pirouetting on the pulse of the tympani. Black Swan captures that soaring, and I’m not sure it could have done so without Natalie Portman. From her first moment on screen, she is a ballerina, as fragile and lithe as you’ve ever imagined a swan or a princess. More important, she shimmers with the serenity and strength of an artist who has finally come into her own. Forget Queen Amidala and V for Vendetta. Here she’s finally the natural-born actor we’ve suspected she was all along — and she’s probably ready to meet Oscar.
Also impressive is Mila Kunis as Lily, a less traditional (and much less repressed) dancer who reflects and distorts Nina’s talent and drive. Lily is both foil and savior to Nina, and Kunis’s performance makes you want to know more about the dark, deceptive anitheroine — even as it makes you fear her. But she’s not merely an opposite; her character is complex rather than stereotypical, adding a layer to the message that nothing is quite as it seems and never so simple as it first appears.
Like Lily, the other female characters in the film also seem two-dimensional at first, but they shed their stereotypical skins to reveal more. Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey play a fading diva and a domineering mother, respectively, but despite flirting with All About Eve and Mommie Dearest (Swannie Dearest?), Black Swan retreats from melodrama. This is not a chick flick; it seems to flip off the very idea and laugh mercilessly at anyone who’ll suggest it.
Black Swan toys with sexual politics, but it’s more interested in internal struggles than power plays. Vincent Cassel is both appealing and revolting as Thomas Leroy, the seductive artistic director of Nina’s company, but he is ultimately powerless. So is everyone else who attempts to control Nina. She is under (or appears to be under) assault at every turn, from her mother to strangers on the subway to her director-mentor, and each foe is equally showy and finally ineffectual. Do your worst, Nina says: I’ve already hurt myself more than you ever could. In her world, no predator is as threatening as her own quest for perfection. Art has already roughed her up and left her raw. What more can man or woman possibly do?
This is probably a good time to address the sex scene between Kunis and Portman, if you can call it that — which I don’t think I can. Their encounter is white-hot, intense and hungry and beautiful in a way that we all want sex to be, but it’s both more and less than sex. Lily is largely responsible for this because she both surrounds and eludes Nina; she is a variation of the classic bad girl, fully there when she’s ready for you and entirely gone when you’re ready for her. (The variation — hallelujah — is that the "you" is Natalie Portman.)
The flickering space between satiety and hunger is where Black Swan lives. Lily and Nina are mirrors of each other, but in a cracked way. When Nina confronts a mirror — in various forms and in many places — it’s not the rising-above moment of A Chorus Line or any of the other traditional moments in front of the typical mirrors of a hundred other shows and movies about dancers reaching their peak or facing their decline. For Nina, each mirror is a revelation (maybe even a Revelation, with four horsemen riding Ambition, Sensuality, Mortality, and Mom). She can see what she wants — even what she is — but it is foreign to her, out of reach in a mystical and maddening way.
Mirrors are the method of Black Swan. When buttoned-up Nina finally lets go and dances with Lily at a nightclub, it’s as if Nina has stepped through the looking glass to the other side of what dancing is. If there’s an antidote to her grueling, almost ascetic life of mother-induced abstinence, trainer-tended health, and Tchaikovsky-enclosed expression, it’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Nina and Lily, though not exactly opposites, are a collision of matter and antimatter that can only produce a void. Nina flings herself into it, and the explosion is suffusive and transformative.
And as Nina transforms, so do we. Black Swan takes the viewer on a thwarted journey. Watching it feels like being frozen at the height of a daring leap, being deprived of the victory of sticking the landing and solving the puzzle. We’re never sure whether Nina is changing or being changed. The glory and pain of art mix with that special Aronofsky brand of paranoia and add up to a shattering and unmooring. We’re released, but we’re lost. We’ve learned that the human psyche is fragile, and that breaking through is the same as breaking. The art of dancing — any art — offers so much, but it burns to touch perfection. Nina can’t hold on to it, and neither can we. We feel the loss of it immediately, the lack of its purity and intensity. Black Swan understands and embodies art: it’s a walking shadow that struts and frets, takes flight and then crumples in a heap. It’s the only moment that counts, and when it’s over, you know you’ve been blessed and cursed.
I started out with only one Black Swan question, but I guess the film has a second: if this is too far, what exactly is the point of holding back? Nina rejects the ice-cold, deprived white swan queen and leaps forward. She dives deep and emerges into the fullness of her darkest, unfettered id. When she takes the stage, the crowd clamors for more — for too much, beyond what she can give — and Nina knows that here and now is perfect and the dancing and the music are sublime. Her black swan soars, and she hitches a ride. If her final shot is a mad smile, a grande jeté, and an open wound, it’s enough. It’s everything. Black Swan will take you there if you let it, and I’m glad I played along.
