FRIDAY, DECEMBER 03, 2010
Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" merges a
ballerina's career with the plot of "Swan Lake", and then even
"Tosca"
Darren Aronofsky ('Pi', 'The Fountain') is famous for'
making art film out of merging reality layers, and 'Black Swan' [no
"the"] is surely his most ambitious experiment (with his own Protozoa
Pictures, Cross Creek, and Fox Searchligh). Natalie
Portman, on camera almost all the time, is an experienced ballerina (Nina)
competing for both 'Swan' roles in a NYC performance of Tchaikovsky's 'Swan
Lake' (an early work). Her rival is Mila Kunis, playing Lily. Now Nina is
supposed to have the career her mom (Barbara Hershey) gave up for having a
family, and Vincent Cassel plays the dictatorial director Thomas, who,
unfortunately for the female competition, is heterosexual and aggressively so.
(He commits what in legal terms would constitute workplace sexual harassment.)
Aronofsky plays up the physical brutality of the life
of a ballerina, the anorexia, the self mutilation,
and turns it into horror, as the plot of the move gradually turns into the plot
of the ballet Swan Lake itself. Nina, after a disco visit (well filmed) uses
some controlled substances, which take her into the world of Inception. We are
treated to her lesbianism, and later to some perverse violence, to the point
that the ending of the ballet (where the rival swans have fought to the death
for the prince) replicates the ending of Puccini's Tosca.
Most of the music score for the film comes from the
ballet, and I had the pleasure to see the film in Digital presentation at a sold out show at the AMC Loews Georgetown in Washington.
Tchaikovsky's music just carries you to the end, where the B Major chords give
a sense of ironic, apocalyptic triumph over the mayhem.
As I recall, Tchaikovsky has sometimes been used in
earlier Smallville episodes, to great effect; Clark Kent in that show is
essentially a ballet artist himself, but hardly anorexic. In 'Black Swan', the
gay male ballet dancers more or less keep a low profile, which is too bad for
the outcome of the story.
The term "black swan" has a specific meaning in the policy world, which Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in his book "Skin in the Game" (2018).
Posted by Bill Boushka at 11:30 PM
Labels: Aronofsky, ballet, Black Swan, classical
music, horror, indie drama, mystery