Be warned: This is not a ballet film! If you like the beauty and elegance of classic ballet, stay away. Black Swan is first and foremost and unashamedly a thriller. From the moment we first see Natalie Portman's face, the viewer should know what's coming. It's a haunted, taut, slightly panicked, frightened face and the camera stays on it, closely and mercilessly. Portman is still beautiful but life seems to have been drained from this face even as the film starts. The endless competition, the permanent watchfulness, the impossibility of letting your guard down even for just one moment. All this is in this face.
At first, things seem to be going fine. Portman's character is a successful dancer, she has the support of the eccentric but serious company director, a loving and supportive mother and she even lands the role she's been craving, dancing both the white and the black swan in Swan Lake. Now she could be confident, lose a little of that stiffness that almost cost her that cherished role.
But her face doesn't change, she seems haunted more than ever, now fearing backstabbing as her success has overtaken most of her colleagues. Her paranoia, her nervous state of mind that is always close to snapping has been there from the start - now it gets ever more intense. An suddenly, very subtly, the supportive environment turns hostiler. The mother becomes overprotective, heartless, brutal, the company director, relentless, aggressive, ruthless.
The pressure mounts and the boundaries between reality and madness begin to blur. What is happening, what imagined? The camera stay close, painfully so, never leaving Portman, zooming in on her face, her body. Because as her mind becomes more and more derange, her body becomes the battlefield of her inner daemons, some of those battles visible, some, maybe, existing in her mind only. This is painful to watch, yet strangely compelling.
Hallucinations follow, set pieces from horror films and thrillers introduced but nothig breaks the fascinating and frightening rhythm of the film. As Portman's character is sucked into that ever more tightening world of paranoia, we are sucked into the film, forced by director and camera to stay closer than we'd like to.
This alone, the drama of a mind snapping under pressure,would be fascinating and compelling to watch, but Aronofsky doesn't leave it at this. As everything tightens, Portman's character is told and pushed to loosen, even lose herself, turn from controlled and controlling to sexual, wild. This, the ballet director tells her, is the prerequisite to being able to play the black swan. So against her will and instincts she tries to let go - on the stage and in real life. She takes risks but is never in it with her heart, the daemons don't leaver her alone. So what was supposed to help her, free her maybe, only pushes her deeper into her own personal abyss.
But Aronofsky has one last twist for us: When the first night comes, she finally realises what it takes to dance the black swan. Letting go is self-destructive as he needs to shed everything she was, everything that made up her personality. She really, brutally needs to lose herself, and he does with a triumphant transformation for which Aronofsky finds an unforgettable image. An image that will last for a long time, as will this remarkable film.
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