“Black Swan” was my most anticipated film of 2010, and thankfully, it did not disappoint. This film is absolutely bat-shit crazy – it is insane, and I love it for it. This film hit all the right notes that I wanted it too, but if I had any problem with the film, I wanted it to go even further into the crazy.
In the film, we follow Nina Sayers, an exquisite ballet dancer, who, after the departure and retirement of Beth Macintyre (the company’s star and lead dancer), is given the role of her life as the Swan Queen in a new adaptation of “Swan Lake”. As a dancer who has dedicated her life to ballet, Nina is ecstatic that she will finally be able to show her talents to the world. At the beginning of the film Nina is a very innocent, naive and sheltered little girl (even though she is 26), which is due to her being brought up by her over-protective mother. She is perfect casting for the role of the White Swan, but Thomas Leroy (her teacher and mentor), is worried that she may not be able to pull off the role of the Black Swan, the darker, sinister and seductive sister of the White Swan.
Nina is a perfectionist and through her efforts to make the moves technically perfect, the passion of the performance is lost – it becomes too rigid and stiff. For her to be able to perform the role of the Black Swan successfully, Nina must break free of her restraints and lose control of herself, something that she finds very difficult to do. It appears early on that the pressure of the role may be too much for Nina, who starts having strange hallucinations (such as the skin peeling from her fingers – Yuck.) and a rash starts to appear on her back (from the way the mother reacts to the rash, it seems as this has happened before, with Nina nervously scratching herself until it bleeds). She is finding her pursuit for perfection to be harder than she ever thought possible and as such she becomes more and more emotional about her failures, to the point that she is a little unstable. However, a night out with Lily (another dancer from the company, as well as Nina’s understudy) is the catalyst that changes everything.
For the first time in her life she goes against her mother’s decision and decides for herself to go to the club with Lily, where she experiments with drugs, alcohol and even sex (it is alluded to that Nina is a virgin). It appears that Nina has found her dark side, that is needed to portray the Black Swan, and this is when the crazy goes absolutely berserk, as her mind has now fractured.
Seriously, from this moment on, the film does not let up until the stunning finale. There is a whole ten minute block of the film which starts at the hospital with Nina visiting Beth and ends with her returning home to her bedroom and passing out, that is probably the best sequence in a film I have seen all year, it is absolutely insane, and I mean all facets of that word. You just have to see the way Nina passes out, it is the biggest WTF moment of 2010 and it just rocked my boat.
The role of Nina Sayers is played by the stunning Natalie Portman, who has finally found another role to fully showcase her talents since her brilliant debut role of Mathilda in Luc Besson’s “Leon” (aka “The Professional”). Without a doubt her performance in “Black Swan” is the best of the year, male or female, she is truly outstanding and it will absolutely net her the Oscar.
From individual scenes to the whole character arc and transformation, Portman never puts a foot wrong. Her best scene in the film is such a tiny moment, but it has one of the most emotional beats in the film from my perspective, and that is the scene when she finds out that she has won the role of the Swan Queen, and she calls her mum to tell her the news. When she says “He picked me Mommy. He picked me.”, while crying happy tears, obviously proud of her achievement, it just melted my heart. The scene was so real that I couldn’t help be emotionally moved by it. However, in hindsight it is also a sad moment, because this is the last time we ever see Nina happy.
In regards to the performance as a whole, you only have to look at Nina at the beginning and compare it to where she is at the end, and they are too completely different people, and Portman is able to convey this brilliantly and subtly, it never feels like one second she is good, the next bad, it gradually builds. I can only imagine how difficult this role was, with everything that she has to go through in this film, it must have been so emotionally draining, not to mention the actual dancing as well. I can not say enough about Natalie Portman, but I must talk about the rest of the cast, who are all outstanding.
When I heard that Mila Kunis was going to be in “Black Swan” I must admit I thought that was a terrible idea (I only knew her from “That 70’s Show”), but I was wrong, she was fantastic. She is incredibly sensual (without even trying) and her Lily is the perfect opposite to Portman’s Nina. When she dances, while her moves are not perfect and she makes slight mistakes, she just feels it, therefore her performance is more real and less mechanic. The always brilliant French actor Vincent Cassel plays Thomas Leroy, and he is, well, brilliant. Apparently Cassel based his performance on a real life character in the New York ballet world, which is kind of scary, considering the sexual ways he gets his dancers to perform (but it is meant to be quite true).
Winona Ryder makes the most of her limited screen time as Beth Macintyre, which is a small but pivotal role in the film. She plays Beth as quite a sad character struggling to cope without all the admiration and cheers of her fans. Personally, I must say that it was great to see Winona on screen again, it has been far too long, and like her once fiancé Johnny Depp, doesn’t seem to age (“Wino Forever” indeed). The other standout performance is that of Barbara Hershey who plays the overbearing mother of Nina, she is quite scary in the repression she forces on her child, and is very similar to Carrie White’s mother (played by Piper Laurie) from Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”. She has a very odd relationship with her daughter, to the point that she is constantly painting portraits of Nina, and as much as she seems happy on the outside with her daughter’s success, she strangely does everything in her power to cause her to fail (for example not waking Nina causing her to oversleep and almost miss practice).
Darren Aronofsky was the director of “Black Swan” and it may be his masterpiece. It would come down to this or “Requiem For A Dream”. In fact, Aronofsky has yet to make a bad film (it’s true, just ask my wife about “The Fountain”), and the biggest mistake that I made on last year’s top twenty list was that I left out his previous film, “The Wrestler”. This was not because I didn’t think it belonged, it certainly did, I just happened to forget it while writing the list. I was devastated when I realized, but the list had been sent out already so I wasn’t going to change it (I did write a small e-mail, explaining my mistake).
The thing about Aronofsky’s films are that they are always brilliant, but they are a tough watch. The emotional content is always high, but he always takes you to a dark place that you would normally be afraid to visit and once you do, you do not want to go back. This is especially true for “Requiem For A Dream”, and while I didn’t find “Black Swan” as grueling as that film, it did leave me exhausted after viewing it. However I was so impressed by the dazzling cinematic tricks that he pulls off in this film that I watched it again the following night.
Speaking of these tricks, now would be the perfect time to mention Aronofsky’s regular (although he didn’t do “The Wrestler”) cinematographer , Matthew Libatique, who once again does stellar work for Darren. When he is dealing with the behind the scenes world of the ballet, he does so in a very rough and grainy style, but he glams it up for the ballet performance. Speaking of the performance, the camera choreography coupled with the dance choreography is simply outstanding and seamless. The camera just glides around Nina in a way that is just majestic, and I’m not sure if it has been done better (although let’s face it, “The Red Shoes” is very hard to top). When, finally, Nina dances as the Black Swan it is simply mesmerizing, and it is the highlight of the show. She is just so into character, it is scary, with those blood red eyes staring straight into camera, it is seriously chilling. Now my knowledge of dance is limited at best, but the differences between the way she dances the White Swan compared to the Black Swan are obvious, and she smolders as the Black Swan.
I want to talk about the poster for “Black Swan” which is of a white background and a picture of Natalie Portman in her Black Swan costume from the shoulders up. It is a nice poster, but you wouldn’t call it outstanding. However once you see Nina perform as the Black Swan, the poster suddenly becomes a whole lot cooler. Suddenly you really notice those searing eyes staring back at you and you can not help but remember the intensity of this scene, causing you to appreciate the image so much more due to the context you can now place on it. Obviously, I could talk about this movie forever (and believe me, there is a lot more I want to say), but I must end this soon. When the synopsis for “Black Swan” first came out, I was hoping for a mixture of “The Red Shoes”, Argento’s “Suspiria” and Polanski’s “Repulsion”, and while there is little that resembles “Suspiria”, the rest is an accurate representation of the film (although it is kind of the reverse of “Repulsion”, which is about a girl denying her sexual impulses, while “Black Swan” is about a girl finally exploring hers).
This is a fantastic psychological horror film, and although it is about the performance of a ballet, the film itself is more like an opera, that continues to build in intensity and then explodes in a thrilling crescendo, and this is why “Black Swan” is my number one film for 2010. To be honest, throughout writing this whole list, “Black Swan” was always at number two, but while writing the review for it, coupled with my “expectations” theory (it is harder to impress if there is expectations, as opposed to if there are none), I decided to flip the top two. Both films are fantastic, but in the end, “Black Swan” takes out the prize for best film for 2010.
Ranked 1 in Top 25 of 2010
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