Black Swan
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Natalie Portman
Runtime: 108 mins
Rating: ****
Black Swan sees Natalie Portman make a career defining performance as Nina, a twenty-something ballerina who pushes her body to its limits for the lead role in her company’s production of Swan Lake. The somewhat frigid and innocent Nina can fulfil the role of the virginal white swan with ease, but is faced with a formidable task in adapting herself to be the lusty, vengeful black swan. As in David Lynch’s Inland Empire the world of performance seeps into the real world posing problems for Nina’s mental health.
As pressure mounts, the atmosphere turns psychologically claustrophobic; the viewer feels a vertiginous sense of entrapment through the movie’s paranoid and hallucinatory nature. A brooding feeling pervades it in its entirety, which doesn’t lift until the movie’s scintillating climax.
Natalie Portman’s challenging role is acted with conviction and empathy in an Oscar-worthy performance. The dance pieces and the film as a spectacle in general is sure to make it a crowd-pleaser, and its thriller style is bound to interest even the most sceptical of viewers.
This is a movie which will have you gripped from the start, up until its dizzying finale. It is almost perfectly paced, and our interest is held throughout. We are granted complete immersion into the stylised monochrome world which Aronofsky weaves.
Although this is a great piece of cinema, its execution is somewhat heavy handed. In dancing terms it is more flamboyant and self-evident than the subtle art of ballet. Black Swan is a film which will hold your hand throughout, and for many this will not be a problem. However, any ambiguities, that may in other movies be left to the viewer to resolve are spelled out to us, for ease of consumption.
This is, however, pedantic. It is otherwise a stylish, genre-bending movie. Set in a highly engaging meta-fictional context, it is as much ballet themed melodrama as an exploration of identity. But perhaps most palpably, it is a journey into the dark realms of human consciousness.
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