Black Swan

Based on the reviews of this film that I have already read, I was apparently supposed to watch The Red Shoes before watching this film. I was not aware of that; I didn’t get the memo. I just thought this looked and sounded like an interesting picture, even if director Darren Aronofsky’s last picture (The Wrestler) was a bit uneven. Two movies before that, however, was Requiem for a Dream, which was a remarkable film - and easily the most disturbing film I have ever seen. Billed as a “psycho-sexual thriller,” Black Swan is the story of ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), who lands the role of the Swan Queen in a new production of “Swan Lake.”

But wait! If you act now, you can also get the lecherous company director (Vincent Cassel), the has-been control freak mother (Barbara Hershey) and the free spirit to your straight lace (Mila Kunis)! Special added bonus: a dancer being “retired” because she is too old (Winona Ryder) and who exists in the story for no particular reason, other than possibly to ratchet up Nina’s bizarre emotional stew another couple of notches.

Nina desperately wants her dancing to be perfect. Other than a scene late in the film when she goes out to a club with Lily (Kunis), as much to irritate her mother as to have fun herself, perfecting her dancing is all that we see Nina doing. She lives in an Upper West Side apartment with her mother, a place that feels cramped and stifling and which it appears as though time has forgotten. Nina’s bedroom is a study in pink and stuffed animals, and mommy is the only person in Nina’s life, apart from her fellow dancers and the narcissistic company director.

For most of the film, Nina’s sole expression is that of someone who continues to do something painful and difficult despite clearly wanting no longer either to do it or to get what comes from doing it. When she ducks into a restroom stall and calls her mother to let her know she got the part, she bursts into what are unquestionably tears of joy; but it is also possible to read them as the frightened tears of someone who is yoked to a terrible sadness. It’s a testament to the strength of Portman’s performance that those tears can be read both ways. (This will not be the scene used when Jeff Bridges reads Portman’s name in the list of nominees for this year’s Best Actress Oscar, but it should be.)

The pink color scheme and stuffed animals are but the first indication that Nina’s perspective is a bit skewed; her symbiotic relationship with her mother is another. Nina is a grown woman, but these indications point to someone who has willfully put off most of what it means to grow into adulthood so that she can achieve this thing for which she has been working since she was very young. When she says that she wants her dancing to be perfect, she is referring to technical perfection - the ability to execute steps and turns and leaps correctly, as they are taught. She yearns for an objective perfection that can be rendered definitively. It is almost accurate to say that she has subordinated her life to this goal; but it is more accurate to say that she has suppressed everything else in her life in order to achieve her goal of balletic mastery.

On the one hand, she has succeeded - both in mastering the steps and turns and leaps and in holding back her life in order to force her body to learn these motions; but on the other hand, she has failed - because the perfection she seeks actually comprises more than technical mastery. She cannot effectively portray both the perfect White Swan and the sensual Black Swan, which the part requires, because to achieve the former, she has forced herself to press down those things inside her that are needed for her to become the latter.

Unable to acknowledge, much less understand, her own deficiencies, she projects the frustrations these cause at those around her: she sees threats in Lily and Beth where none exist; she feels imprisoned by her mother, though she is free to leave at any time; and she reads sexual predation into Thomas’ efforts to get the Black Sawn to emerge from her. This last affront is the only one that is real, but her perception of it is amplified by her refusal to submit to - or perhaps even acknowledge - her own natural sexual maturity.

As Nina is pulled to and fro by these forces within and without her, Aronofsky uses the mortal weakness of her own body to symbolize what is happening to her inside her own mind. She constantly inspects her feet for damage, finding broken toenails and blood; and despite an obsessive attention to keeping her fingernails trimmed she finds scratches on her back, more blood. Her mother’s artwork taunts her from the walls where it hangs, and Nina cannot even go out for a drink with Lily without losing herself in a dream.

What is most compelling about the film, though, is the way in which Nina gradually begins to change the things about her that keep her from being able to portray the Black Swan. Slowly but surely, she sorts out what is real and what is not, what is of her own making and what is not. Portman’s expression may not change all that much, but she begins to imbue Nina with an energy from within, as Nina begins to understand more and more about herself and the world she has built for that self. It is not revealing too much to say that, by the end, Nina has perfected both the White Swan and the Black Swan; but it would be revealing too much to say exactly how Aronofsky and Portman get her there. You’re just going to have to see that for yourself.