Dancing in the dark

Darren Aronofsky is improving with every film he makes. 2008's The Wrestler was a much grittier, matter-of-fact affair than people were used to seeing from the director, and his latest effort, Black Swan, infuses elements of this with the etherealness of his earlier works - making for something more punch-drunk than David Lynch, while packing more punch than Mickey Rourke.

Black Swan opens in a dream. Nina (Natalie Portman) is the white swan - one half of the principal role in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Dancing this role is the fantasy of many a girl and young woman, but this ballerina's dream is about to come true.

Soon after her reverie, Nina is shocked to be told she will lead in the forthcoming season of Swan Lake for her New York ballet company. But there's no time for celebrations, as the show's director, Thomas Leroy (a superbly slimy Vincent Cassel) remains underwhelmed by Nina's interpretation of the black swan - the second, more sensuous half of the role.

To complicate matters, a dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company. With sass, sex and more than a touch of deviancy, Lily has all the traits of the black swan that Nina so lacks.

Definite parallels can be drawn between Black Swan and older film classics, two in particular. All About Eve is the chilling tale of an understudy psychotically obsessed with her idol, while Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes tells the story of Vicky Page, a ballerina torn between her love of a man and her infatuation with ballet.

Black Swan undoubtedly derives from both, but being a member of a contemporary generation of filmmaking, Aronofsky is able to take timeless concepts of paranoia, jealousy, ambition and obsession, and twist them into something extremely visceral.

From the outset, it's clear this isn't going to be any Swan Princess. Dressing-room bitch fights, lecherous choreographers, bloodied toes and strained limbs depict a dark underside of ballet that is usually veiled by the curtain.

At the center of it all, Portman is nothing but stunning as homey, naive Nina, whose wildest nightmares never contemplated the hells that await her in playing the swans. She may have taken a hint from her retiring predecessor Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), who, in a drunken rage, hurls herself into fast-moving traffic with horrific consequences.

Blinded by the stature of the role, however, Nina submerses herself in a search for the black swan within her. Twenty-nine-year-old Portman reaches her peak to date in this portrayal of the girl-next-door gone berserk.

As if her acting wasn't captivating enough, Portman put herself through 12 months of arduous physical training to perfect her role as the troubled ballerina. It doesn't take an expert to see that the effort has paid off in spades, and with Aronofsky's deft camera trickery to sand down the edges, Portman's dance sequences are enough to make the Bolshoi jealous.

Nina's is a small world - one in which she becomes trapped, ricocheting off three people for whom her trust is weakening by the second. There's her mother (Barbara Hershey), a specious woman who appears to have Nina's best interests at heart, but with possible underlying malice. There's also Swan Lake director Thomas Leroy - certainly a frisky creature, but whether or not he's plotting the demise of his star is unclear.

The greatest threat of all, though, is Nina's new nemesis, Lily. Mila Kunis takes a huge leap from what she's better known for (Date Night, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and voicing Family Guy's Meg Griffin), and her alluring performance as Lily is consummately measured in its innocent bubbliness and its drink-spiking dastardliness.

Dizzying fantasy sequences and queasy camerawork ensure you often don't know if what you just saw actually happened. Nina's paranoia is ours, and as she spirals into dementia, we're sucked down with her.

Add into the mix psycho-sexual tension, doppelgangers in darkened doorways, mystery rashes and facial stabbings - all punctuated of course by Tchaikovsky's inimitably stirring score - and you have a film that is melodramatic, but awesomely so.

Black Swan builds to an almighty crescendo as opening night arrives and Nina's moment is upon her. Just as you would hope, it's a startlingly brilliant finale, in which previous fragments piece together, and the most mesmerizing dance yet unfurls.

Lapping up all the blacker aspects of past masterpieces, Black Swan is in itself an instant classic, and as a supine Portman breathlessly murmurs her last line, it's an incredible ending to a perfect film.

For more on Black Swan, see The Prague Post Film Blog: Black Swans and Red Shoes

Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com