Earlier this morning, I was driven by the lack of better things to do to reach for a DVD that has been sitting on my shelf for as long as I could remember.
After weeks and weeks of wanting to see it but never finding the time to watch it I finally saw
The Black Swan, the title character which Natalie Portman hauntingly embodied – the same role that bagged her all the major awards this year – including the much-coveted Academy Award for Best Actress.
The Black Swan, the title character which Natalie Portman hauntingly embodied – the same role that bagged her all the major awards this year – including the much-coveted Academy Award for Best Actress.
The movie was directed by Darren Aronofsky, whose previous accomplishments included The Fountain and Requiem for a Dream.
The film was opened by the scene where the artistic director of the New York Ballet company telling young, eager dancers that his new version of the Swan Lake would need a new lead, in the hopes of making the new season’s presentation ‘real’ and ‘visceral.’
We then catch a glimpse of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), her face lighting up, dreaming to land the role of the Swan Queen – she is a perfectionist, follows the routines rigidly but Thomas (played by Vincent Cassel) feels unsure if she can pull off the darkness and rage of having to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan. Determined to be a cut above the rest, she does her pirouettes until her toes bleed and her nails crack, she self-mutilates (perhaps to silence the voices in her head), she eats nothing less than a halved citrus and sticks her finger inside her mouth so she could vomit what she has just consumed. Nina looks frail and undernourished – and as the film progresses we begin to understand what these physical tortures did to her mind.
Nina is trapped in a claustrophobic apartment she shares with her Mommy Dearest, Erica (Barbara Hershey), trapped in the idea that everything must be done with precision, with no unmeasured line or curve to be taken, otherwise, she cannot fit in the cookie-cutter world she lives in.
As she ascends to stardom, Nina slowly loses her mind to paranoia and gets distracted by seduction and conflicting desires. She delves into the blackness of her own soul so she could keep the role and so she could live up to her own expectations. She uses dancing as an escape but then the movie transports us to this slow and painstaking metamorphosis of a talent dying for the love of ballet while trying to discover what freedom could do for her.
I grew up in a family that likes to listen to music of all genres. I know that Peter Tchaikovsy wrote the demanding classical ballet The Swan Lake. Now, I vividly remember the jumps in the notes and the intricate play of instruments to define and differentiate Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. The Black Swan is in itself an achievement of bright minds doing the best they could to master their craft, but I would have to say that the classical version is not as deadly shocking and serious.
Though the film had in it a number of computer-generated effects to give us an idea of the troubled and wicked mind Nina has, I am still convinced that nothing in it felt mechanical. I did not see the apparent shift in scenes and dialogues, there were no cuts in the frames. All felt like a flowing, continuous elegy.
It is an art-house triumph, with two of Hollywood’s geniuses (Portman and Aronofsky) polishing the already beautiful – making it as unforgettable as our own personal episodes of obscurity and clarity, our own battle to do more good than bad, our own misery to have darkness be defeated by light.
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