Black Swan

Black Swan opens up with a sweeping shot of Natalie Portman dancing in the spotlight. She’s dancing Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky’s well-known ballet. The simple, peaceful scene quickly goes awry as it’s a dream that quickly becomes a nightmare. Her partner grows feathers, and dons a monstrous visage. Not everything is what it seems with this scene, and the same can be said about the movie.

Say what you want about Aronofsky, but he’s a brave one. Some might regard making a movie about ballet as career suicide, so the idea of turning it into a psychological thriller seems overly ambitious if not downright pretentious. Aronofsky’s the man for the job though, and the result is nothing short of amazing.

Portman plays Nina Sayers, a talented but naïve ballerina who is about to be cast as both the White and the Black Swan a new, ambitious, production of Tchaikovsky’s opus. Portman’s Nina is technically sound as a dancer, and her sensitive nature makes her perfect for playing the White Swan. The Black Swan, on the other hand necessitates a sensual, dark performance, and Nina finds this role hard to live up to, much to the dismay of Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy, the ballet’s director.

Enter Lily, played by the ever-lascivious Mila Kunis, a member of the same ballet company that’s always late, parties hard, and dances imprecisely, but effortlessly. Lily is an obvious pick for the role of The Black Swan. Nina starts to feel the pressure, between Leroy’s frustrations, Lily’s lack of effort and seriousness and her mother’s overbearing nature. Things then take a turn for the strange, and to Aronofsky’s credit, few people will see all of it coming.

Given the movie’s concept, it’s obvious themes of duality, identity, art and its sacrifices abound. I didn’t expect Freudian allusions and dark twists on maternity, sensibility and sanity, even scenes of a shocking nature that at a glance seem out of place (you’ll know them when you see them). Aronofsky returns to his technical tricks after the relatively bland (as far as it was visually concerned) The Wrestler, and what a joy it is to behold. He finds interesting and unexpected angles, especially when filming the ballet scenes, which have an almost visceral nature.



Black Swan feels like a documentary at times, and like a horror movie at others. Clint Mansell’s score is haunting: he twists, rearranges and splices back together fragments from Swan Lake, but not beyond recognition. It’s hair-raisingly beautiful, and complements the movie without being distractful.

Cassel and Kunis are excellent supporting roles, but make no mistake about it: Black Swan is a star-making vehicle for Natalie Portman, and all but guarantees gold for her come award time. She goes from subtle to over the top then back again several times. This would have been an amazing performance without the months of preparation she went through to actually be able to dance the role, but taking that into regard, I’m starting to feel sorry for every other actress out there this year.

Great movies are easy to spot out: they transcend any genre they could be fit into. This is not another dance movie, nor another psychological thriller. In between these two coordinates, Aronofsky carves his own niche, and seals it back again. The result is one of the best movies of 2010, thanks in no small part to Portman, whose presence gives this Black Swan its wings.

10/10 Stefan