A meticulously-molded adaptation of the Swan Lake ballet into a psychological horror. I dig it.
The movie follows young ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), an ambitious perfectionist whose dream seems to come true when she is selected to play the lead role of the Swan Queen in her company's new, reimagined version of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet. The big twist is that both the lead role and the role of the antagonist and rival, The Black Swan, will also be played by Nina. The real challenge is for the uptight, extremely conservative Sayers to try and learn how she can let go and play a dark, manipulative, highly sensual character such as The Black Swan. The immense pressure she puts on herself is ratcheted up in the form of Lily (Mila Kunis), a fellow company dancer who seems to embody all of the bold sexuality that the company director wants Nina to show when she plays the Black Swan.
Like nearly all of Aronofsky's movies, I love how he approached this story. While his movies are ostensibly all about very different topics and take place in vastly different worlds and genres, from science fiction to mathematics to drug addiction, they all seem to focus on the psychology of obsessive personalities. Black Swan is no different, looking at how an obsessive perfectionist sees her world start to fall apart as she confronts and tries to embody a character who is more than she can handle. As has often been the case, Natalie Portman handles the strong script exceptionally well (I've always found that she performs up or down to the script she's given), especially when she has to shift between the pristine White and the malevolent Black Swans towards the end of the picture.
Then there is the visual component. I thought Aronofsky and his longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique translated all of Nina's claustrophia and mania throughout the entire movie. And the surreal visual effects at the end of the movie are done to great effect. These are things that could have come off as silly, but they only enhance the heightened and fractured mental state that Nina is undergoing while she dances on opening night.
This was the second time I'd seen this movie, but it was the first since its theatrical release back in 2010. It holds up, though, just as I've found all of Aronofsky's films do. I believe this is a function of his always imbuing his movies with multiple layers, with at least one of them being themes universal enough that they transcend almost any attempt to date them. Black Swan won't be for everyone. A friend of mine who really loves ballet couldn't shake the fact that the version of the ballet in the movie is a wildly different take on Tchaikovsky's original. Also, the movie is far less about ballet specifically and much more about the drive that can consume a person. The fact that Nina is a ballerina is mostly incidental; she could be the mathematician Max in Pi, Randy "The Ram" in The Wrestler, the titular Biblical prophet in Noah, or any of the protagonists in Aronofsky's movies. But if one doesn't get hung up on the ballet aspect of it too much, and if one is open to dark tales that dig into some twisted psychology, then Black Swan is for you.
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