With a turkey-filled tummy, a much lighter wallet and Christmas tunes in my head, I tried something with decidedly less holiday cheer this Boxing Day—Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece, Black Swan.
Black Swan is an engrossing and deeply disturbing film about Nina (Natalie Portman), a young ballerina vying for the role of the White Swan in the ballet, Swan Lake. The White Swan is perfect for the immature and innocent Nina—her bedroom still decorated in pink with stuffed animals surrounding her bed.
However, the ballet company’s director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) casts the same ballerina in the role of the virginal White Swan and her evil doppelganger, the Black Swan.
Nina competes for the role against others in the company, most notably Lily (Mila Kunis), who acts as Nina’s real-life doppelganger, being more sexually mature and free-spirited.
The choice of Portman as Nina could not have been more fitting. Aronofsky uses frequent close-ups of her face, her symmetry adding to the theme of beauty and perfection.
Portman’s strength is in her face, as Nina’s character does not have to say much. When her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) sees that the role is becoming too much for her daughter, Nina only needs to answer “I’m fine,” and the audience knows this could not be farther from the truth.
It not only gives insight into Nina’s struggle for perfection but also about her relationship with her mother.
Aronofsky’s subtlety is his strength. In the first half of the film, we get only slight glimpses of who Nina is. He hints at the darkness within Nina: her stares at the competition, her obsession with practicing and the scratches on her back that indicate the resurgence of a destructive pattern from her younger years.
Aronofsky asks the audience to be patient, but at times too patient. While Nina’s lack of emotion (her face hardly changes until the final act) could be seen as subtle, it sometimes comes off as a lack of character development. Hints and subtleties can only go so far since, as an audience, we want to find out more about Nina’s inner thoughts and motivations.
But our patience is soon rewarded with the last act in the film where everything comes undone. We see Nina become the Black Swan on and off the stage — with tragic results.
While the film is quite subtle and dark for the most part, the final act could be considered a little over the top and graphic. It is almost as if we are seeing a whole different film — from a character study of a girl in search of perfection in the destructive world of ballet to a thriller about a girl experiencing a psychotic breakdown.
This is not a film for the faint of heart hoping for an exploration of the search for perfection. More than anything, the film is a thrilling and disturbing piece that shows that darkness can be found in all of us.