Where to begin? Director Darren Aronofsky chooses to begin in a dream, his ballet dancer protagonist illuminated against the darkness by the white shaft of a spotlight. We may well stay in this dream for the duration, so ethereal and otherworldly is Black Swan. Where his previous film The Wrestler made a big noise about its lack of big noises and real-world, follow-shot aesthetic, here Aronofsky marries similar devices of verisimilitude to the splintered hallucinoscapes of Requiem For a Dream and The Fountain. Such catachrestic combinations makes for something of an Aronofsky ur-experience, but Black Swan is such an accomplished feat of filmmaking that every grace note and every plunge, every glide and every misstep, are entirely intended.
Surely there is no need to rehearse the plot here, so much hype has the film received on ‘the festival circuit’ – suffice to say it concerns the casting, rehearsals, and performance of a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and the intense psychological pressure placed on lead dancer Nina Sayers. As played by Natalie Portman, Nina is a quivering and epicene virgin predestined to become an emotional wreck in a matter of years – indeed, the same thing seems to have happened to her mother, whom actress Barbara Hershey does a fine job of saving from the pigeonhole of thankless grotesque.
There is no mention of a father figure, absent or otherwise, which is indicative of Black Swan’s attitude towards gender roles. Some may find its sexual politics dubious, but as an effort to create a dramatic scenario between competitive women not dependent on male attention it is to be commended. But wait!, you may cry, what of the insidious director of the ballet Thomas (Vincent Cassel) and the importance his approval plays in the story? This is true, but it is also skin-deep, and to an extent the film dramatises the attempt of women to forge a space for themselves which does not have to suffer phallic intrusion. The strange final gesture of Winona Ryder’s over-the-hill (at 28!) dancer Beth is the most explicit condemnation of such violation, while those familiar with Swan Lake itself will note the far from insignificant omission at the end of the production-within-a-film, itself suggesting a measure of success for Nina and her sex even in a moment of tragedy.
This focus on the way women are looked at called to mind the recent Amer, an ode to Dario Argento currently playing at London’s ICA, which also deployed some schlock horror to make its point (although in Amer’s case I could have done with much more). Black Swan itself goes some pretty dark places (to put it mildly), and there is certainly something trashy about some of the shock-cuts and accompanying thunderous music stings. Yet once again these are deployed in something of a sincere attempt to enter a feminine subjective viewpoint – it should be noted the occasionally creepy Thomas is never the subject of horror (and a throwaway backstage moment during the final performance from the actor playing the villain Rothbart is telling), but rather the many women who surround Nina provide the jolts, themselves all possibly projections of Nina’s splintered Freudian subconscious.
Issues of psychological breakdown under intense pressure and identity slippage? Did somebody mention American Psycho? Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel on yuppie malaise makes a wonderful companion piece to Black Swan, and rather than the differences between the films accentuating the genders of the protagonists, a comparison if anything reveals the precariousness of Patrick Bateman’s masculine authority and draws out the common ground between the ballet dancer and the investment banker. Narcissism, insecurity and submerged violent urges are not to be relegated to one sex or another, but are common features of the contemporary human condition. For New Yorkers, at any rate.
The allegorical structure of the film of course demands that the production be more than mere background, and certainly Tchaikovsky’s music is just as integral to the experience of Black Swan as is the narrative of the ballet. What further intrigues, though, is the extent to which the film may be read as a depiction of the creative process: the stress, tensions, and rewards of the long gestation of a piece of great art, a process at once both self-revelatory and self-destructive. I would, perhaps controversially, or at the very least bizarrely, also suggest an affinity between this and Tron: Legacy, both grappling with the burden of creation, and ultimately coming to a similar conclusion of drastic self-effacement (although prompted by somewhat different motives). Even Patrick Bateman is himself something of an artist – check out his daily planner – and his “no catharsis” moment in the final scene is itself a catharsis, as he is subsumed to the indistinct mass of designer suits and tanned skin from which he never really departed. (The camera itself even has a habit of disappearing in Black Swan during the many fleeting moments one should be able to see it reflected in the myriad of mirrors on display.)
This is all to somehow avoid mentioning the remarkable synthesis of sound design, staging, and special effects in the film. There is something unforgettable – yet above all accurate – about the chiaroscuro effects of the New York subway (and this film is so very, very good on New York) overlain with the creeping sounds of flapping wings. The minutiae of ballet dancing preparation is explained with all the care of a documentary (shoe preparation, sessions with a physiotherapist – apparently a real event captured by Aronofsky after Portman injured herself on set), although one hopes the rehearsal spaces at Lincoln Centre don’t much resemble the charcoal-shaded carcereal tombs created by a remarkably on-point production design team.
So where do we end? Where we began of course – on the stage. That hot spotlight is well earned, as Black Swan is a remarkable filmmaking achievement which may have a heightened awareness of its own artifice, but more than make a virtue of that, makes it the whole point.
