BLACK SWAN (2010)

Once more, please, with feeling.

originally published January 20, 2011

Color, 2010, 108 m. / Directed by Darren Aronofsky / Starring Natalie Portman, Barbara Hershey, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder  / Fox Searchlight

Nina, pretty ballerina,

Now she is the queen of the dancing floor;

This is the moment she’s waited for,

Just like Cinderella. (Just like Cinderella)

                                --ABBA

What is Art? Who creates it? To achieve it, what must one be ready to sacrifice its name? Finally, what does it all mean, in the end?

The answers to none of these questions are found in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Despite what you may have heard, the movie is not, in fact, a look at life inside the turbulent world of ballet. Those hoping to find this year’s The Red Shoes or, heaven help you, Fame, will be sorely disappointed. 

When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created their peerless The Red Shoes in 1948, they set the bar for movies about dance extremely high. Their film tells the tale of a dancer so consumed by her passion for dance that in the end she could not escape the very fate described for the role she portrays in the ballet-within-the-movie of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. 

The Red Shoes deals with obsession and Art on many levels as its various characters suffer for their devotion to music, dance, theatre, etc. You come away from the film either terrified by its depiction of the high cost of success, or, as many people viewing the film did, with a renewed passion for Art. Countless girls became ballerinas in the years when the film was shown regularly, solely based on their emotional experience of being exposed to The Red Shoes at an impressionable age.

It’s doubtful that anyone watching Black Swan will be moved to do anything but stay far away from toe shoes and beware of waifish women staring blankly in subway stations. The more squeamish might have flashbacks akin to those who found their stomachs turned by David Cronenberg’s take on The Fly (1986), envisioning mascara-brush-like feathers erupting from their shoulders.

In his down-and-dirty Ms.45 (1981) director Abel Ferrara dropped us into a nightmare New York City where pretty, mute Zoë Tamerlis exacted revenge upon all men, the result of being sexually assaulted and having to murder her attacker. But, where Ferrara gave us a heroine who rose scarily out of the ashes of her degradation, Aronofsky is at sea with what do to with his, and Nina, played by Natalie Portman in one of those performances the baffled almost always refer to as “brave,” has little to do but react with bland incomprehension at each shuddering jolt of the plot.

Perhaps we are supposed to react to Nina as we did to the character played by Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s study of descent into madness, 1965’s Repulsion. In that film, Deneuve found herself (like Tamerlis in Ms. 45) increasingly isolated in her small world, enduring a series of escalating hallucinogenic experiences because she feels abandoned by her more outgoing sister.

But the differences between Repulsion and Black Swan are crucial. It is abundantly clear in every frame of Polanski’s movie what Deneuve’s mental state is. We see her collapse, and we respond to it, because we know she is unbalanced; the indicators are very clearly delineated. Aronofsky doesn’t make such distinctions. Consequently, we are left wondering, for example, if Barbara Hershey’s ridiculously unwound character is actually Portman’s mother, or just a figment of her unraveling imagination.

Aronofsky has always created hermetically sealed worlds within his movies, but, aside from his abortive The Fountain, this movie suffers the most from such a narrow scope. Despite a few cursory characters around the edges of her world, Portman’s conscious life seems to consist solely of interaction with her (possibly non-existent) mother, Vincent Cassel as her director, and newly arrived Mila Kunis. Sure, she has a teacher/coach at the dance academy, and there are other girls, but important dialogue exchanges are few and far between.

A prime example of Aronofsky’s attempt to cheat us with his “is it real, or isn’t it” approach is in the character of Winona Ryder’s recalcitrant star ballerina, whom Portman replaces in Cassel’s allegedly revolutionary restaging of Swan Lake. Ryder is forced to undergo increasingly unflattering contortions of overacting, sometimes within the same scene, in order to provide Portman something to react to. Their final encounter stretches credulity to the breaking point, and the movie’s refusal to address or even acknowledge what it insinuates (did Portman stab Ryder in the face with a nail file?) is as insulting as it is irresponsible.

Just what are we supposed to make of this movie? If it is a character study in madness, then why not address it in a world where we balance Portman’s insanity against, say, Kunis’ sanity? What is the point that Aronofsky is making here; that too much devotion to ballet is dangerous? And, if so, who suffers besides Portman? Is this Cabin Fever in toe shoes? Getting back to Cronenberg, his explorations of the body in revolt against itself are always directed at a theme: the inhumanity of media dependency (Videodrome), the internalization of rage (The Brood), even the over-dependence on video games in lieu of reality (eXistenZ). Black Swan only gives us the gruesome/borderline-idiotic symptoms without really commenting upon the cause.

In 2001, moviegoers were presented with In The Bedroom, which turned out to be, in the end, a high-flown remake of The Last House on the Left. With Black Swan, Aronofsky seems to be attempting to do for Suspiria what Todd Field and Robert Festinger did for Wes Craven’s early shocker. 

Unfortunately, the director doesn’t seem to have studied his source material very closely, and the movie rolls by, making very little impression at all, beyond its outré set-pieces and ill-advised CGI effects. The movie doesn’t even offer anything new in its presentation of Black Swan’s supposedly electrifying ballet; all its dance sequences seem piped in from PBS’s “Live At The Met.”

Dario Argento’s Suspiria operates almost entirely on dream logic, with its tale of Jessica Harper arriving at an exclusive European dance academy and discovering supernatural horror beyond belief. Argento plunges his characters into a Technicolor-saturated world that becomes a haunted house ride of the highest order. Aronofsky can’t even get the horror right, and when Black Swan finally decides that it wants to be the Rosemary’s Baby of ballet films, it treads upon its own bloody feathers. It’s Kubrick’s The Shining, re-conceived as a Revlon ad.

By the time her big opening night rolls around, we’ve been watching Portman behaving like a frightened kitten for the past hour and a half. I don’t know about anyone else, but for someone who “strives for perfection” and “dances perfectly, but without feeling”, her character never comes across as anything more than competent.

It’s no hidden truth that mediocrity works just as hard as genius; it’s only the end results that are different.