A- | A repressed prima ballerina experiences frightening visions ahead of her dancing the lead in Swan Lake. Directed by Darren Aronofsky Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel Review by Jon Kissel |
Darren Aronofsky is a director who lives in the extremity of human experience, for good and ill. Something like Requiem for a Dream tracks the depths that people are willing to descend to for their narrow definition of happiness, while his self-described Perfection duo, The Wrestler and Black Swan, are both about performers dedicated to feats of physical excellence despite the damage this does to their psyches and bodies. He’s also an obvious devotee of body horror master David Cronenberg, a guy who made his bones by taking the psychological ailments of his characters and manifesting them in decaying flesh and pulsing tumors. Black Swan is Cronenbergian body horror shot through with Aronofsky’s bravura directorial flourishes, a film about transformation and transcendence that includes breathtaking moment after breathtaking moment. It’s also campy and melodramatic and soapy, and maybe sexist depending how one views it. Nine years after its release, Black Swan is still a thrilling and powerful watch that holds up cinematically even as I wonder if it holds up thematically.
The most surprising thing I noticed in this latest rewatch, the third time I’ve seen Black Swan, didn’t crop up til the credits. Aronofsky directs, sure, but this female-fronted and female-focused film has three male writers of no great credit (Black Swan was notably the only Best Picture nominee in 2010 to not get a writing nomination), half a dozen male producers, a male editor, and a male cinematographer. One has to wait for the traditionally female positions of production designer and costume designer to see a woman’s name. It’s certainly possible that lead Natalie Portman exerted some creative influence on the script or the filming, but she’s not credited as such. Black Swan contains facets about women as performers, as mothers, as daughters, as subordinates, as objects of desire, and of desirers, but it’s all seen through a man’s eyes, and in the case of Aronofsky, a man who puts his female actors through the wringer on his sets. Jennifer Lawrence damaged her vocal cords on the set of mother!, and the trials of Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connolly’s characters in Requiem continue to haunt. I don’t quite sign on to the idea that this film is in any way sexist, but I can’t help but wonder how it might’ve played with more female input behind the scenes.
With that large asterisk addressed, Black Swan quickly asserts itself as my kind of film. The opening dream sequence of Portman’s Nina Sayers dancing with a warlock from Swan Lake is flashy and exhilarating, giving the viewer their first taste of the nervy sound design that’s going to characterize the rest of the film, as well as the long takes of ballet that are going to make sure the viewer knows how much of the dancing that Portman herself is doing. This scene is followed by one of process, of Sayers getting up in the morning and flexing her creaky toes (body horror establishing itself quickly) and later going through the many esoteric steps necessary to break in a pair of ballet shoes. These will be followed by ever-more extreme transformations complemented by the film’s impeccable sound design. Aronofsky establishes his tone early, in that Black Swan is going to be dreamlike and operatic while also being intimate and detailed and sensual, such that we’ll hear every exhale and joint pop.
As the second half of his Perfection duo, Aronofsky puts all this physical drama in the distinctly female world of ballet, compared to the male world of professional wrestling. While both activities have participants from the opposite gender, they’re coded as feminine or masculine, and a very specific kind of each. Ballerinas need to be kept as tiny and girlish as possible, both for the purposes of being easier to lift and to put less pressure on their pirouetting toes and for the aesthetic tradition that ballet culture may very well insist on. Just as Aronofsky was interested in the nitty-gritty of Randy the Ram’s pursuit of a hairless and tanned and powerful body, the camera finds here the stretch of tendons and the flexing of muscles in pursuit of grace. Why else include the hypnotic scene of a choreographer practicing wing flaps with Nina, with the one-scene character’s wiry back to the camera as it ripples like a bag full of snakes? Even when Nina isn’t having a psychotic break that manifests as her body breaking down, there’s plenty of awe to found in the lengths the human body will go to in Black Swan.
The viewer sees in Mila Kunis’ Lily and other ballerinas that it’s possible to thrive in an art form that demands girlishness while still behaving like an adult woman. Nina Sayers is not able to do so. A strength of Black Swan is that there are many possible reasons for why Nina still dresses and lives like a tween, or younger, despite Portman being in her late 20’s at the time of filming. She could be taking the wrong lessons from her chosen profession. She could be so consumed with technique that she just doesn’t have the mental space to consider sex or independence. It’s possible that her mom is a sexually abusive predator and that has frozen Nina at the age when she was first abused (to be continued). She’s a psychologically rich character, and seeing her break away from her mother is the closest Black Swan has to a victory, even if Nina peaks developmentally at somewhere around 18 or 19 instead of her actual age.
With that large asterisk addressed, Black Swan quickly asserts itself as my kind of film. The opening dream sequence of Portman’s Nina Sayers dancing with a warlock from Swan Lake is flashy and exhilarating, giving the viewer their first taste of the nervy sound design that’s going to characterize the rest of the film, as well as the long takes of ballet that are going to make sure the viewer knows how much of the dancing that Portman herself is doing. This scene is followed by one of process, of Sayers getting up in the morning and flexing her creaky toes (body horror establishing itself quickly) and later going through the many esoteric steps necessary to break in a pair of ballet shoes. These will be followed by ever-more extreme transformations complemented by the film’s impeccable sound design. Aronofsky establishes his tone early, in that Black Swan is going to be dreamlike and operatic while also being intimate and detailed and sensual, such that we’ll hear every exhale and joint pop.
As the second half of his Perfection duo, Aronofsky puts all this physical drama in the distinctly female world of ballet, compared to the male world of professional wrestling. While both activities have participants from the opposite gender, they’re coded as feminine or masculine, and a very specific kind of each. Ballerinas need to be kept as tiny and girlish as possible, both for the purposes of being easier to lift and to put less pressure on their pirouetting toes and for the aesthetic tradition that ballet culture may very well insist on. Just as Aronofsky was interested in the nitty-gritty of Randy the Ram’s pursuit of a hairless and tanned and powerful body, the camera finds here the stretch of tendons and the flexing of muscles in pursuit of grace. Why else include the hypnotic scene of a choreographer practicing wing flaps with Nina, with the one-scene character’s wiry back to the camera as it ripples like a bag full of snakes? Even when Nina isn’t having a psychotic break that manifests as her body breaking down, there’s plenty of awe to found in the lengths the human body will go to in Black Swan.
The viewer sees in Mila Kunis’ Lily and other ballerinas that it’s possible to thrive in an art form that demands girlishness while still behaving like an adult woman. Nina Sayers is not able to do so. A strength of Black Swan is that there are many possible reasons for why Nina still dresses and lives like a tween, or younger, despite Portman being in her late 20’s at the time of filming. She could be taking the wrong lessons from her chosen profession. She could be so consumed with technique that she just doesn’t have the mental space to consider sex or independence. It’s possible that her mom is a sexually abusive predator and that has frozen Nina at the age when she was first abused (to be continued). She’s a psychologically rich character, and seeing her break away from her mother is the closest Black Swan has to a victory, even if Nina peaks developmentally at somewhere around 18 or 19 instead of her actual age.
The entire film exists in Nina’s head, so Portman’s the focus of every scene, and she has some doozies. As far as the actual ballet is concerned, I don’t especially care how much Portman is responsible for and how much was a double. The film does use face replacement technology a la Cersei Lannister’s walk of shame or I Tonya, but who knows how much. I’ve frankly never been too impressed by actor’s pulling off physical feats. See my Major League review for just such an example. What I am concerned with is how Portman is throwing all of herself emotionally into the role. She taps into a scared and tentative part of herself that crosses the line from vulnerable into pathetic, which is exactly what’s required of Nina’s early scenes. She is irritatingly passive, until she finally kills the girl and erupts as the titular antagonist with only a few minutes left. Her grand entrance as the black swan is jaw-dropping in each segment, starting from her gonzo wide-eyed stare down the camera to her luxuriating backstage in her newfound power and culminating in her onstage transformation and her reducing Vincent Cassel’s Tomas to a giggling boy.
That final transformation wouldn’t be so powerful if the film didn’t spend almost its entire running time telling Nina what she’s missing. This is most often put in the mouth of Tomas the ballet director, and in the physical performance of Kunis’ Lily. His instruction to Nina that perfection is more than technique is made manifest in the angel-wing tattooed Lily, who immediately makes clear what he’s talking about. She’s plainly less controlled than Nina, but if confronted with a choice between a ballet starring Nina and one starring Lily, no one would choose NIna. The difference in how Nina treats them is one area that might’ve been changed with more female influence. Despite Tomas’ sexual aggression, made doubly uncomfortable by the youthful way Nina behaves, she trusts him to the end, treating him as a brilliant gatekeeper with only the troupe’s best intentions at heart. Conversely, Lily is a figure of jealousy without reason, introduced as fun and kind in spite of Nina’s standoffishness. To the film’s credit, Lily isn’t catty or a saboteur, but Nina treats her as such. Some of that could be misdirected at herself, as Nina’s delusions include Lily as a sexual fantasy, or, least charitably, the writers might have nothing to say about female friendship.
Away from the studio, there’s only Barbara Hershey’s Erica in Nina’s life. Aronofsky provides enough backstory to sketch out Erica’s entire life, a former ballerina herself who never rose to Nina’s heights for whatever reason, though Erica’s pretty sure it’s because she got pregnant with Nina. She’s spent the entirety of her daughter’s life worshipping her and resenting her, and maybe something darker. There are some creepy vibes between Nina and her mother, exacerbated by when Aronofsky’s usual editor Andrew Weisblum chooses to cut. Nina induced to lick icing of Erica’s finger is bad enough. Is it accidental that that same finger is the one that develops a gruesome hangnail in the next scene? There’s another scene in the middle of the film where Erica stands in Nina’s doorway with her hair down and her blouse unbuttoned, asking if Nina’s ready. Ready for what? The topper is delusion Lily calling Nina ‘sweet girl’ after having fantasy sex with each other. Why would Nina’s subconscious put her mom’s pet name for her in the mouth of her imagined lover? All those suspicions having been voiced, Erica gets the purest, truest moment of the film in the final moments, when Nina looks out into the crowd and finds her with a look of concentrated admiration and pride on her face. That luminance doesn’t absolve her of perhaps molesting her daughter, but it knocks some time off her sentence.
Viewing Black Swan almost a decade after its release is most altered by the cultural events and trends of the last two years. Both Tomas’ treatment of Nina and the potentially exploitative nature of the film’s sexiness come into question. For a female-focused film with only men on the page and behind the camera, there’s a lot of girl-on-girl action here. Again to the film’s credit, it’s not lurid and there’s no actual nudity, and it’s not like a male director can’t empathetically capture female desire. It would just be nice if there was someone I could point to besides the cast who could’ve potentially weighed in, and then I wouldn’t have to make these allowances. On the Tomas front, Black Swan could be viewed as a Whiplash antecedent, where a mentor’s awful behavior prompts the student towards greatness. A more negative view frames it as sexual harrassment as motivator. If Nina doesn’t stab herself with a shard of glass and maybe die, Tomas would be patting himself on the back in praise of the brilliance of his coaxing that performance out of Nina by any means necessary, something an intense director would perhaps want to imagine about himself. Tomas’ big comeuppance otherwise is being aggressively kissed by Natalie Portman. I doubt a similar film made today would view him as instructive as Black Swan might view him. Tomas’ sin is seen to be his exchanging of Winona Ryder’s Beth for Nina, instead of that he’s involved with them at all.
The film that might’ve been notwithstanding, Black Swan remains as exhilarating and outrageous and disconcerting as it was in 2010. There are several instances where I had to go back and watch scenes over again, reveling in Aronofsky’s camerawork or Portman’s intensity or that face that Hershey makes at the end. The body horror combined with the capital-b Big acting make it fun to watch, praise that Aronofsky, with several un-rewatchable movies under his belt, does not typically earn. I’ll be reading some feminist critique between now and the podcast, but the power of Black Swan tamps down my doubts. This remains one of the best films of the decade. A
That final transformation wouldn’t be so powerful if the film didn’t spend almost its entire running time telling Nina what she’s missing. This is most often put in the mouth of Tomas the ballet director, and in the physical performance of Kunis’ Lily. His instruction to Nina that perfection is more than technique is made manifest in the angel-wing tattooed Lily, who immediately makes clear what he’s talking about. She’s plainly less controlled than Nina, but if confronted with a choice between a ballet starring Nina and one starring Lily, no one would choose NIna. The difference in how Nina treats them is one area that might’ve been changed with more female influence. Despite Tomas’ sexual aggression, made doubly uncomfortable by the youthful way Nina behaves, she trusts him to the end, treating him as a brilliant gatekeeper with only the troupe’s best intentions at heart. Conversely, Lily is a figure of jealousy without reason, introduced as fun and kind in spite of Nina’s standoffishness. To the film’s credit, Lily isn’t catty or a saboteur, but Nina treats her as such. Some of that could be misdirected at herself, as Nina’s delusions include Lily as a sexual fantasy, or, least charitably, the writers might have nothing to say about female friendship.
Away from the studio, there’s only Barbara Hershey’s Erica in Nina’s life. Aronofsky provides enough backstory to sketch out Erica’s entire life, a former ballerina herself who never rose to Nina’s heights for whatever reason, though Erica’s pretty sure it’s because she got pregnant with Nina. She’s spent the entirety of her daughter’s life worshipping her and resenting her, and maybe something darker. There are some creepy vibes between Nina and her mother, exacerbated by when Aronofsky’s usual editor Andrew Weisblum chooses to cut. Nina induced to lick icing of Erica’s finger is bad enough. Is it accidental that that same finger is the one that develops a gruesome hangnail in the next scene? There’s another scene in the middle of the film where Erica stands in Nina’s doorway with her hair down and her blouse unbuttoned, asking if Nina’s ready. Ready for what? The topper is delusion Lily calling Nina ‘sweet girl’ after having fantasy sex with each other. Why would Nina’s subconscious put her mom’s pet name for her in the mouth of her imagined lover? All those suspicions having been voiced, Erica gets the purest, truest moment of the film in the final moments, when Nina looks out into the crowd and finds her with a look of concentrated admiration and pride on her face. That luminance doesn’t absolve her of perhaps molesting her daughter, but it knocks some time off her sentence.
Viewing Black Swan almost a decade after its release is most altered by the cultural events and trends of the last two years. Both Tomas’ treatment of Nina and the potentially exploitative nature of the film’s sexiness come into question. For a female-focused film with only men on the page and behind the camera, there’s a lot of girl-on-girl action here. Again to the film’s credit, it’s not lurid and there’s no actual nudity, and it’s not like a male director can’t empathetically capture female desire. It would just be nice if there was someone I could point to besides the cast who could’ve potentially weighed in, and then I wouldn’t have to make these allowances. On the Tomas front, Black Swan could be viewed as a Whiplash antecedent, where a mentor’s awful behavior prompts the student towards greatness. A more negative view frames it as sexual harrassment as motivator. If Nina doesn’t stab herself with a shard of glass and maybe die, Tomas would be patting himself on the back in praise of the brilliance of his coaxing that performance out of Nina by any means necessary, something an intense director would perhaps want to imagine about himself. Tomas’ big comeuppance otherwise is being aggressively kissed by Natalie Portman. I doubt a similar film made today would view him as instructive as Black Swan might view him. Tomas’ sin is seen to be his exchanging of Winona Ryder’s Beth for Nina, instead of that he’s involved with them at all.
The film that might’ve been notwithstanding, Black Swan remains as exhilarating and outrageous and disconcerting as it was in 2010. There are several instances where I had to go back and watch scenes over again, reveling in Aronofsky’s camerawork or Portman’s intensity or that face that Hershey makes at the end. The body horror combined with the capital-b Big acting make it fun to watch, praise that Aronofsky, with several un-rewatchable movies under his belt, does not typically earn. I’ll be reading some feminist critique between now and the podcast, but the power of Black Swan tamps down my doubts. This remains one of the best films of the decade. A
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