Black Swan- a review
While watching Black Swan with Blake recently, I was fully aware of why I was enjoying it; it was loopy, the dialogue was indulgently high-context, and scenarios seemed to be concocted deliberately for the reaction of a crowded theatre. In other words, Black Swan was more concerned with portraying characters as they'd behave in a movie, not in depicting how people behave in real life. It's no less identifiable though; we do and say things that are appropriate in real life, but our interior monologues may say differently. I thought of Adaptation often while watching Black Swan. Nicholas Cage's Charlie Kaufmann rambled to himself often, and we see the same thoughts taking place in Nina. But the characters in this film do and say things to each other in this movie that in real life we only keep to ourselves because we have impulse control.
By the way, Black Swan is about ballet.
For Nina, everything in her life was turning out perfect...until she met Lily. Now... something is about to happen... (That's a rough translation from the commercial on Univision, and a great way of summing up the film in two sentences)
Nina(Natalie Portman) is a hard-working ballerina who's very precise and symmetrical about her dancing. She gets cast as the Swan Queen in a New York-based ballet company's performance of Swan Lake. The fact that she is a sheltered woman (her mother makes her breakfast, asks about her dance routines, and prevents her from going out and partying) is part of the reason she's afraid to let loose...this daily routine, which has been mapped out to a T, makes it hard for her to exhibit a creative spirit in the part as the Black Swan, who seduces the Prince so that the White Swan cannot turn back into a princess. A stiffness towards self-expression is one thing standing in the way of her impressing the company's director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel, in full gangly creep mode, just the way I remember him). Leroy tries to talk dirty to Nina and feels her up to bring out her bad girl side.
Wait a minute, does this actually happen in dance studios? How can this guy just up and act on his attraction for one of the dancers? Wouldn't there be an obvious conflict of interest and a double agenda for his casting her?
I didn't stay hung up on this point for long, though, as I realized I was getting swept up in the movie. Black Swan at times feels like it's set in an alternate universe, about fifteen degrees removed from our reality, where there are no consequences for a ballet director doing what he wants with whom he wants (be it merely making out or actually having sex with them), and dancers openly and freely loathe the one who gets the lead in a production. But director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin together shepherd this vision into an observed world all its own on film. I so enjoyed watching Thomas Leroy stare Nina down indulgently. I delighted in seeing Nina's none-too-secretive bitterness towards new arrival Lily (Mila Kunis). Lily and Nina do not it it off great, seeing as Lily's a brilliant dancer, and gets the attention of Leroy for her looseness with dance. Nina can achieve and sustain the centripical force necessary to spin her body multipal times on the tip of her toe. But she can't make it look magical.
"Not so controlled! Seduce us!" Leroy shouts.
He goes on to ask one of the other male dancers if he would sleep with Nina, which on the surface seems TOTALLY irrelevant to whether she's a good dancer. But of course, dancing is more than just nailing the moves. It's about captivating the audience in an intoxicating experience.
I thought of Sir John Gielgud's Cecil Parkes teaching a young David Helfgott (Noah Taylor) to play the Rach III in Shine.
Cecil- Don't you think it's important to learn the notes you're going to play?
David-Right, right...then forget them.
Cecil- Exactly.
Around the middle of the film, Lily tries to make amends to Nina by coming to her apartment and inviting her out to dinner...is this a gesture of good will? Or could it be Lily has a forbidden attraction for Nina? Or could she just be trying to get the better of Nina? Who cares? The film delights in exploring the character's possible double agendas and their respective capacity for pettiness in the face of achieving a personal goal.
Once Nina gets some alcohol in her at the club (she's very slender so it hits her fast), she becomes a very different person indeed. Once Nina and Lily get back to her bedroom, Nina has a sexual awakening with Lily...will this moment of lesbian congress assist Nina in achieving the naturalistic spirit devoid of restraint that is the Black Swan? Or is Lily conquering Nina through intimacy just as she aspires to in dance? Is what we're watching even happening? Like Inception, we really don't know when to believe our eyes in this picture.
Nina really feels the heat when Lily steps into the rehearsal space and Thomas Leroy allows her to rehearse the White Swan. Nina arrives late one day and finds Lily doing the dance.She masters the choreography, but even as she has the brains for dance, she is less concerned with precision than she is performance.
Any one who has ever wanted a part so bad they can taste it but watched from the ensemble knows that Lily is setting her sights on the plump lead in Swan Lake. It's not a gesture of altruism to fill in for Nina for the sake of the rehearsal; Lily's dance outright screams "give me the part!" Nina finds she's losing her nerve with Lily around. Nina keeps telling herself she can pull off the White Swan's innocence and the Black Swan's bad girl sense of disregard. But she can't seem to let herself go the way that Lily does so beautifully in dance. And having acted before, I know what it's like to be up for a part that you really want, to do relatively well in the auditon, then have someone else come along and outdo you! It's one of the most terrible feelings to know that your best is not good enough.
In real life, good generally prevails, even if good will is only part of what the spurned performers feel. In this film, though, we get to see the characters' true colors when things don't go their way.
As Nina faces the performance of Swan Lake, she has lost control of her life, more or less. She can't get all the dance moves perfect anymore, and yet she's feeling more awake and real. She never struggled with playing the White Swan before, but now she does. Meanwhile, though, she is attacking the Black Swan with renewed vigor, capable of menace if necessary to jealously guard her role in the ballet.
It's unnerving to make that journey with Nina, to observe her dissolution into dressing room vengeance. And for me, Black Swan could be viewed either as a cautionary tale about the consequences of giving one's self over entirely to the fine arts (even at the expense of sanity), or a celebration of people who risk their well-being for the sake of turning out a great performance. The thunderous applause exemplifies the value of an art form when the summit of its quality is realized. Whether or not that was even the intention of the filmmakers, these difficult questions get tossed out over the course of the film.
Good supporting work by Barbara Hershey as Nina's overbearing mother and Winona Ryder as Beth, the dancer who was pushed into retirement well before she was ready to hang up the dance slippers.
Natalie Portman even said there were times she thought she might die making this. She made it, and gave a great acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress Drama. And having seen she's gained all her weight back through pregnancy, I can feel much better about myself for giving the film four stars.
By the way, Black Swan is about ballet.
For Nina, everything in her life was turning out perfect...until she met Lily. Now... something is about to happen... (That's a rough translation from the commercial on Univision, and a great way of summing up the film in two sentences)
Nina(Natalie Portman) is a hard-working ballerina who's very precise and symmetrical about her dancing. She gets cast as the Swan Queen in a New York-based ballet company's performance of Swan Lake. The fact that she is a sheltered woman (her mother makes her breakfast, asks about her dance routines, and prevents her from going out and partying) is part of the reason she's afraid to let loose...this daily routine, which has been mapped out to a T, makes it hard for her to exhibit a creative spirit in the part as the Black Swan, who seduces the Prince so that the White Swan cannot turn back into a princess. A stiffness towards self-expression is one thing standing in the way of her impressing the company's director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel, in full gangly creep mode, just the way I remember him). Leroy tries to talk dirty to Nina and feels her up to bring out her bad girl side.
Wait a minute, does this actually happen in dance studios? How can this guy just up and act on his attraction for one of the dancers? Wouldn't there be an obvious conflict of interest and a double agenda for his casting her?
I didn't stay hung up on this point for long, though, as I realized I was getting swept up in the movie. Black Swan at times feels like it's set in an alternate universe, about fifteen degrees removed from our reality, where there are no consequences for a ballet director doing what he wants with whom he wants (be it merely making out or actually having sex with them), and dancers openly and freely loathe the one who gets the lead in a production. But director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin together shepherd this vision into an observed world all its own on film. I so enjoyed watching Thomas Leroy stare Nina down indulgently. I delighted in seeing Nina's none-too-secretive bitterness towards new arrival Lily (Mila Kunis). Lily and Nina do not it it off great, seeing as Lily's a brilliant dancer, and gets the attention of Leroy for her looseness with dance. Nina can achieve and sustain the centripical force necessary to spin her body multipal times on the tip of her toe. But she can't make it look magical.
"Not so controlled! Seduce us!" Leroy shouts.
He goes on to ask one of the other male dancers if he would sleep with Nina, which on the surface seems TOTALLY irrelevant to whether she's a good dancer. But of course, dancing is more than just nailing the moves. It's about captivating the audience in an intoxicating experience.
I thought of Sir John Gielgud's Cecil Parkes teaching a young David Helfgott (Noah Taylor) to play the Rach III in Shine.
Cecil- Don't you think it's important to learn the notes you're going to play?
David-Right, right...then forget them.
Cecil- Exactly.
Around the middle of the film, Lily tries to make amends to Nina by coming to her apartment and inviting her out to dinner...is this a gesture of good will? Or could it be Lily has a forbidden attraction for Nina? Or could she just be trying to get the better of Nina? Who cares? The film delights in exploring the character's possible double agendas and their respective capacity for pettiness in the face of achieving a personal goal.
Once Nina gets some alcohol in her at the club (she's very slender so it hits her fast), she becomes a very different person indeed. Once Nina and Lily get back to her bedroom, Nina has a sexual awakening with Lily...will this moment of lesbian congress assist Nina in achieving the naturalistic spirit devoid of restraint that is the Black Swan? Or is Lily conquering Nina through intimacy just as she aspires to in dance? Is what we're watching even happening? Like Inception, we really don't know when to believe our eyes in this picture.
Nina really feels the heat when Lily steps into the rehearsal space and Thomas Leroy allows her to rehearse the White Swan. Nina arrives late one day and finds Lily doing the dance.She masters the choreography, but even as she has the brains for dance, she is less concerned with precision than she is performance.
Any one who has ever wanted a part so bad they can taste it but watched from the ensemble knows that Lily is setting her sights on the plump lead in Swan Lake. It's not a gesture of altruism to fill in for Nina for the sake of the rehearsal; Lily's dance outright screams "give me the part!" Nina finds she's losing her nerve with Lily around. Nina keeps telling herself she can pull off the White Swan's innocence and the Black Swan's bad girl sense of disregard. But she can't seem to let herself go the way that Lily does so beautifully in dance. And having acted before, I know what it's like to be up for a part that you really want, to do relatively well in the auditon, then have someone else come along and outdo you! It's one of the most terrible feelings to know that your best is not good enough.
In real life, good generally prevails, even if good will is only part of what the spurned performers feel. In this film, though, we get to see the characters' true colors when things don't go their way.
As Nina faces the performance of Swan Lake, she has lost control of her life, more or less. She can't get all the dance moves perfect anymore, and yet she's feeling more awake and real. She never struggled with playing the White Swan before, but now she does. Meanwhile, though, she is attacking the Black Swan with renewed vigor, capable of menace if necessary to jealously guard her role in the ballet.
It's unnerving to make that journey with Nina, to observe her dissolution into dressing room vengeance. And for me, Black Swan could be viewed either as a cautionary tale about the consequences of giving one's self over entirely to the fine arts (even at the expense of sanity), or a celebration of people who risk their well-being for the sake of turning out a great performance. The thunderous applause exemplifies the value of an art form when the summit of its quality is realized. Whether or not that was even the intention of the filmmakers, these difficult questions get tossed out over the course of the film.
Good supporting work by Barbara Hershey as Nina's overbearing mother and Winona Ryder as Beth, the dancer who was pushed into retirement well before she was ready to hang up the dance slippers.
Natalie Portman even said there were times she thought she might die making this. She made it, and gave a great acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress Drama. And having seen she's gained all her weight back through pregnancy, I can feel much better about myself for giving the film four stars.