Recently, I told my
Facebook friends that,
finally, I was going to get a crack at
Black Swan--thank you,
Netflix--and would go in with an open mind and sloppy food. I decided against the sloppy food, and boy, am I glad. Had I really tried to eat during this flick, I couldn't have kept anything down.
Which is not to throw shade on
Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror show. On the contrary, this vertiginous profile of a pathologically insecure, unraveling individual--not the entirety of ballerina-hood, mind you--is effectively disturbing. Its job is to make you queasy. If it doesn't, frankly, you're not paying attention.
Every frame over the top,
Black Swan forces you to sit inside the head of young Nina Sayers (
Natalie Portman), with eyes forced open
Clockwork Orange-style, and experience the outside world in the decidedly skewed, feverish way Nina sees it. Visually, it's a mind-blower, and its constrictions, hyperboles and stereotypes derive from Nina's inner visions. It's clear that, from start to finish, the audience never sees anything that exists out there in actuality. And that is the genius of
Black Swan.
Which doesn't exactly make it easy to love. There's certainly no one to like and get behind in this movie--not the severely troubled lead, not her sexist ballet master (
Vincent Cassel), not her overbearing mother (
Barbara Hershey), not her immature and envious colleagues, not even her rather vacant ballet partner (
Benjamin Millepied). And even if you go for pretzel logic and try to twist Nina's late-act Black Glama moment into a kickass feminist metamorphosis, there's the sticky little matter of the way things end for her.
I recently saw
Wallace Shawn's
Marie and Bruce (with excellent
Marisa Tomei and
Frank Whaley), and it's a strange thing, indeed, to spend quality time inside a rancid little world with characters that, from jump, make your skin crawl. Aronofsky takes the kind of risk Shawn took in his 1978 play. The risk works, here, if you accept what Aronofsky is doing, instead of hoping for a redeeming tale or a documentary about careers in ballet.
Black Swan's setting is the world of ballet--just as the setting of a murder mystery might happen to be the world of publishing or Wall Street--but it is not about ballet and has nothing to say to ballet. Except perhaps that, like Aronofsky's
The Wrestler,
Black Swan draws from a milieu that exploits illusion and sells tickets.
With all of that pushed out of the way, how you respond to
Black Swan will be determined by your tolerance for psychological melodrama taken past places Alfred Hitchcock might cross the street to avoid. Not for every taste. But now that I have finally seen it, I can understand why some people who have no investment in ballet call it a gutsy work of art.
