Black Swan: Let's Make Odile

Is it necessary to be a deep thinker in order to make good movies? Luckily for Darren Aronofsky, it isn’t. That’s not to say he doesn’t reach for profound ideas in film after film, but it’s a comic-book notion of profundity. In movies like Pi or The Fountain, he doesn’t think through his idea so much as present them in as intense and visually dynamic a manner as possible. Intellectually, Requiem for a Dream is on about the same level as Reefer Madness, but the sheer go-for-broke dynamism of Aronofsky’s filmmaking managed to convince a whole lot of moviegoers that they were getting the gritty truth about drug addiction. I like Aronofsky’s willingness, time and again, to risk looking ridiculous, and I like the way he has used the Dardenne Brothers’ relentlessly probing visual style to bring a new level of fraughtness and intimacy to American screen acting. The director he most reminds me of is Ken Russell, only without Russell’s sense of humour. You can imagine Aronofsky wanting to remake The Devils, for instance, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Altered States was a big formative influence on Pi and The Fountain.

Many critics have compared Aronofsky’s new film, Black Swan, to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, which also tells the story of a fragile, sex-phobic woman slowly descending into madness, but what it reminds me of the most is Ken Russell’s segment from the anthology film Aria, in which a woman who has undergone a shattering, violent real-world event loses herself in a stylized, fantasy-world version of that experience, set to achingly beautiful classical music.

Aronofsky’s heroine is Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballerina who has danced for years in the corps of a big-city dance troupe. When the troupe’s brilliant but vaguely sinister artistic director (Vincent Cassel) decides to cast her in the lead of his new production of Swan Lake, Portman’s psyche rapidly begins to crumble—on top of the enormous physical punishment that Portman must endure every day as a professional ballerina, Cassel repeatedly berates her in the rehearsal hall for her inability to embody the dark sensuality of Odile, the “black swan” in Tchaikovsky’s story; her witchlike stage mother (Barbara Hershey) constantly undermines her self-confidence; and a beautiful, intimidatingly self-assured new member of the company (Mila Kunis) appears to be scheming to replace her. Soon, Portman, who still lives with her mother and whose emotional age seems to be frozen at around 13, starts having visions of threatening female figures—sometimes Kunis, sometimes Hershey, sometimes a smirking version of herself—lurking around her, and of her skin peeling off or literally breaking out in gooseflesh, as if feathers are about to spring from her back. It’s one of those films where it’s an open question as to just how much of it is taking place within the main character’s head—I’d say Black Swan consists of roughly 60% hallucination, and even then, the remaining 40% has a nervous, off-kilter energy that reflects Portman’s feverish state of mind.

One of Aronofsky’s great visual achievements in Black Swan is his ability to tell an expressionistic horror story using not black and white, the genre’s traditional colour scheme ever since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the white, pink, and grey palette of the rehearsal hall, of leotards and legwarmers, and of Portman’s absurdly childish bedroom, with its ruffled bedspread and its dozens of stuffed animals. He and cinematographer Matthew Libatique fill the film with ingenious variations on the theme of dark, sensual colours trying to break through girly pastels—the dark feathers beneath Portman’s skin, blood oozing from Portman’s cracked toenails and fingernails, a pink towel stuffed beneath a door in hopes of absorbing the blood seeping out from under it.

I also love that Black Swan is a parable about, and even a celebration of, the arduousness and the sacrifice that go into creating any work of art. In this respect, it’s the anti-Avatar; it’s a film in which acquiring one’s ideal body is shown to be a painful, decade-long process. Physical metamorphosis is not for the faint of heart, Black Swan tells us, and it’s hard to know whether to look upon the results with awe or terror. You can’t help but notice just how little Natalie Portman is in this movie—she’s so heartbreakingly tiny as to seem utterly defenseless against the world. Her body is as underdeveloped as her personality. (Of course, that makes it all the more breathtaking when Portman ultimately finds her inner “black swan” and suddenly commands the stage with the authority of a fairytale queen.)

As I filed out of the theatre at the end of Black Swan, I overhead a guy telling his date that he liked the movie but thought it “went, like, way over the top at the end.” I’ve never understood where people have gotten this idea that the correct critical response to melodrama is to shrink away from it, or to pretend you’re somehow intellectually above it. Look, there’s no point in going to a picture like Black Swan unless you’re prepared to surrender to it, and embrace all of its ballet-movie clichés—the controlling mother, the manipulative choreographer, the bitter, aging star, the bunheads whispering and gossiping viciously behind their fellow performers’ backs. You don’t go to a ballet for the story, after all; you go for the energy and the physicality of it, you go to see what the choreographer does to reinvent these traditional elements, and you go in hopes of seeing a transcendent performance or two. Black Swan, as overheated as it may occasionally get, and as diagrammatic as its parallels between Swan Lake and the people in Portman’s life may be, delivers all of that—it’s ideal Aronofsky material.

You know, in a movie so filled with mirrors and doppelgängers, I wonder if it ever struck him that he’s the mirror of Portman’s Nina, the careful, timid dancer who finds it hard to access her flamboyant, emotional side. Aronofsky, meanwhile, is a go-for-broke artist whose work could use a little more Nina-like restraint and precision. The black swan in the film’s title might actually be Aronofsky himself.