From the first ten minutes of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, you know how it is going to end.
However, the end isn’t what is important in this psychological thriller. It’s the exploration of the protagonist’s harrowing spiral into madness that is the real focus of the film.
Despite arriving in theaters nationwide on December 17, Black Swan topped many critics’ Top 10 of 2010 lists of films. It has also been awarded a Best of 2010 award by the American Film Institute. The film has been nominated for 4 Golden Globe awards and is receiving huge amounts of Oscar buzz, namely for Natalie Portman’s performance as the troubled protagonist, Nina. Already Portman has won 12 critic awards for the role.
The plot is simple enough – Nina, a dancer with a New York City ballet company, has been cast in the coveted role of the Swan Queen in the new production of Swan Lake. However, the role requires her to also dance the part of the Black Swan, the seductive and cunning doppelganger of the Swan Queen. Nina, played with perfection by a doe-eyed and timid Portman, is spot-on casting for the role of the good and pure Swan Queen. But the Black Swan role gives her more trouble as Nina’s dancing is all about technique and perfection rather than passion and sensuality.
While Nina struggles to find her inner Black Swan, she befriends Lily (Mila Kunis), a new dancer at the company, who is everything Nina is not. She’s an energetic, fun-loving and passionate dancer. Lily represents more of the traits of the Black Swan and as such, Nina becomes a bit obsessed with her. Lily brings some much-needed comic relief throughout this dark film and Kunis’s sensual performance perfectly complements Portman’s.
The other major player in this dark dance is the company’s director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) who tries to motivate Nina into exploring the darker parts of herself to prepare for her Black Swan role. Thomas is ruthless with his direction of Nina and it ultimately leads her to be consumed by the role, rather than just embracing it temporarily.
Even though the basic plot is simple, the minute details are not. Nina, driven by her desire to be perfect to please both her director and over-bearing mother (Barbara Hershey), begins to hallucinate about seeing a dark, mysterious version of herself (which she often confuses with Lily). Aronofsky plays with this idea of doppelgangers throughout the film with Nina and Lily, as the two look similar but have opposite personalities.
Many critics have mentioned the graphic nature of the film, but I did not found it gory at all. Any fans of the horror genre can stomach this. The disturbing nature of the film comes from the unreliability of its protagonist. As the film is told through Nina’s perspective, the audience never has a clear view of what is really going on. Nina’s hallucinations are presented as events in the film and it’s only later that Nina (and the audience) realize something strange happened. Because of this, there are a lot of twists and surprises that you definitely won’t see coming.
Aronofsky has a gift with taking the ordinary and distorting it to the point that it is unsettling. He takes the beautiful art of ballet and explores its darkest recesses. Against the backdrop of a posh ballet company, a young woman loses her mind. This startling juxtaposition is why Black Swan is such a beautiful, mesmerizing event.
