Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010)
My Winter Movies # 9
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Like the über-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that’s never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who’s clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we’re never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.) […] By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body horror. But as the movie goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization (or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what’s at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement’s sake. With this movie’s curious inattention to the question of why performing matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl’s brutal struggle to become Baskin Robbins’ employee of the month. (Slate)
Aronofsky has never been known for his subtlety, but now it seems like he’s metamorphosed into some kind of arthouse Tony Scott, desperately throwing everything he can at the screen in an attempt to create anything in the way of tension. I get that it’s ‘all very Polanski’ and ‘totes a Cronenberg homage bbz’ but honestly, it just doesn’t work in this case. […] there’s a difference between making a point very, very clear and making so many different points that the audience stop giving a shit. Black Swan, sadly, does the latter. (More here.)
