Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a movie about a delusional ballerina that, very daringly, does not appear to cue the audience as to how delusional she is. In other words, viewers who want to know what “really” happened will leave the theatre disappointed at best and delusional, themselves, at worst — as they try to locate code to decipher. Where does the story end and the nightmare begin? Does Nina (Natalie Portman) suffer an inadvertently self-inflicted wound at the end? Is Lily (Mila Kunis) a scheming competitor or an ingenuous colleague? Is Erica (Barbara Hershey) a loving mother or a demented enabler? How much of Nina’s relationship with the ballet company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) is wishful? Does anything at all in The Black Swan really happen?

If questions such as these oppress your mind as you leave the theatre, then Mr Aronofsky’s movie will have failed you — or you may have failed it. If, in contrast, you’re upset by the extremes of vulnerability and fragility that Ms Portman projects in every scene, then you’re far more likely to give the picture a satisfactory rating.

But allow me to propose a third test: if, after seeing Black Swan, listening to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is a new and shocking experience, then you’ll be really delighted that a friend dragged you to a movie that you hadn’t really intended to see.

I’ve never seen Swan Lake danced. There’s a lot of ballet that I haven’t seen. I always have a good time when I do “go to the ballet,” and I make a point of seeing the Paul Taylor Company every year, but by the time I’m done with concerts and plays, I’ve run out of steam. Once, in my radio days, I was asked to present an armful of roses to a ballerina at the end of a performance at Houston’s Miller Theater, and that was an eye-opener. Standing backstage, I watched the corps’ beaming smiles rise and fall with the curtain; when the audience couldn’t see them, the dancers were not happy campers. That was one of several experiences that intensified my determination to remain on the audience’s side of the proscenium. I know that artists suffer for their work, but I don’t want to see the suffering, because it’s not the point. The point is the finished artwork or the performance. Which is pretty much why I didn’t intend to see Black Swan. The bleeding toes, the grinding repetitions and the twittering malice, the total commoditization of a pretty dancer’s body — these are not the things that make ballet interesting or enjoyable. They make it seem more like an unfair labor practice, or an undesirable one, even, one not unlike prostitution.

Thanks to Nina’s delusions (however extensive they may be), the bleeding toes and so forth are moved to the background of Black Swan, and will impress and/or shock only those viewers who have never given a thought to ballet. Mr Aronofsky intends us to take them for granted to the same extent that dancers themselves do. It’s what happens beyond the normal agonies — what the rigors of dance can do to the psyche, not to the body — that interests him. And he has chosen to explore the violence and damage of ballet in terms of what is arguably its most celebrated examplar. He amuses himself by twisting the narrative elements of Swan Lake — the evil spell, the doppelgänger, the thwarted love — into a movie about a hardworking girl who lives with her mom on the Upper West Side. The score is a rich blend of Tchaikovsky’s original and Clint Mansell’s eerie variations on it. It is impossible to imagine a more darkly gleaming matrix for the drama of Nina’s breakdown.

Which is, curiously, what Swan Lake seemed to be about when I listened to the music the next day. Forget Rothbart and the Prince and the cygnets and the fustian moonlight. The music seemed to voice a more invasive nightmare. As it soared and glittered and plunged, now sparkling, now tragic, I inhabited Nina’s troubled mind, in which bogus souvenirs of an innocent childhood jostled with one of the most gruesome metaphors for sexual maturation imaginable: spiky feathers poking horribly through raw, scratched skin. I felt that I was inside Natalie Portman’s contorted face and wracked body. The wretchedness was unendurable but also transfiguring: so this was what Swan Lake is really about! By paying compelling but inventive homage to a great work of art, Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan re-creates it.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 at 11:58 am.