Black Swan

Who would have thought that a movie about ballet could be so scary? Forget about the fact that I’m naturally a jittery person, ‘Black Swan’ had me squirming in my seat and watching through the slits of the fingers that covered my eyes. The story is about meek and mild-mannered Nina, a back-up dancer in a large ballet company who suffers from a dangerous combination of shyness, ambition and psychotic delusions. Nina’s big break comes when she is cast as the Queen Swan in the company’s production of ‘Swan Lake’; and while she is well-suited to the role of the white swan, she must overcome her timidity to play the sensuous and aggressive black swan.

The production’s rehearsals, and the small cast of characters who surround the heroine are the backdrops for Nina’s escalating psychosis. Thomas Leroy is the stereotypically misogynist company director, who seduces Nina and takes advantage of her apprehension in order to get her to ‘loosen up’; Erica Sayers is the overbearing, controlling, jealous mother whose attitude oscillates between joy for her daughter’s success and resentment that it came at such a price to her own burgeoning dance career; Lily is the free-spirited new recruit whose confidence and precarious nature both entice and threaten Nina; and finally there is Beth, the veteran dancer whose position Nina has unwittingly usurped, and who the young dancer desperately wishes to become. These characters, and the protagonist’s increasingly unstable mindset, push Nina further into an abyss of fatigue-inducing training, paranoia, and finally self-destructive psychosis as she struggles to become the ‘perfect’ ballerina.

Nina’s snowballing descent into insanity is underscored by a bleak, yet crisp, palette of grey and monochrome tutus and dance studios, a beautifully dramatic orchestral soundtrack, some very creepy and spine-tingling special effects, and camera work which spins with the dizzying swiftness and grace of the passionate dancer and her confused, ambitious psyche. The film reaches its crescendo at the opening night of the production, where Nina’s shyness, ambition, fatigue and hallucinations all dramatically collide in a tragic conclusion.

In this film, director Darren Aronofsky captures, with chilling realism, Nina’s psychotic unravelling. As does Natalie Portman, whose performance just this week earned her the Golden Globe for best actress. Separately, the individual elements of this film – music, special effects, acting, cinematography – were excellent, and really added to the texture, tension and thrill of watching it. But together, they did not quite mesh completely. While it was visually and musically stunning, there was something slightly off about the story that I can’t quite articulate. Perhaps it was Nina’s unexplained delusions, the two-dimensionality of characters like the company director, or the haphazardly-developed (non)relationship between Nina and Lily. Either way, I’m not entirely sure that I like the movie. I certainly don’t hate it, but it was missing a crucial something that would have made me like it. But still it is worth a viewing, not for its realistic insight into the cut-throat world of ballerinas, but for its disturbing depiction of the deterioration of an already-weak mind. [Image from http://www.washingtontimes.com/]