Friday, December 3, 2010

The very fact that a film like Black Swan is able to make it to the screen, to garner big-name stars like Natalie Portman, to unleash its particular brand of absolute wall-scratching insanity upon a popular film viewing audience makes me glow with excitement that Darren Aronofsky is making movies. Even if Black Swan was a total abomination, a film more immersed in balls-to-the-walls insanity then actual story telling, the fact that it was made would still press a smile to my face. Yet luckily for me, for you, for the whole fucking film viewing world, Black Swan is an absolute success, the type of art-house madness you’d expect from the French in the 1960s, big, brash, and one of the truly great films this year.

Review - Black Swan

Natalie Portman gives easily her best performance in years (possibly ever) as the waif, aspiring dancer Nina Sayers, a wisp of a girl who through sheer determination has pushed herself to the top of a prestigious New York ballet company. With the weight of a brilliantly severe mother (played with aplomb by the much missed Barbara Hershey), a seeming ballet rival (Mila Kunis in full sultry-eyed sex mode), and the lead role in Swan Lake pushing down on her, this fragile creature, well, starts to crack. And that’s all I’m giving you. So much of the enjoyment in Aronofsky’s film derives from watching just how far he’ll push not only his characters, but the audience. How far down the rabbit hole he’ll take this decidedly fucked up little creature he’s created in Nina Sayers.

For all of Black Swan I sat in quivering fear, of what terror Aronofsky would unleash next upon his broken protagonist, of what deluded path he’d lead her down. Portman is brilliant as the bulimic perfectionist, her high cheek bones and porcelain skin adding to the illusion that at any moment Nina Sayers could shatter. It isn’t just her look though, Portman brings a truly dualistic performance to the screen, at once creating a barely emotionally functioning ballet robot, while underscoring her with this raging beast of uncontrollable lust and need just lurking beneath the surface. It is, without competition, the very best female performance of the year.

Aronofsky is at full force here, mixing the cinema verity hand-cams of The Wrestler with the carefully preened, yet absolutely bonkers visuals of The Fountain in to a film that far exceeds both the reach and success of both films. He manages to create a ballet within a cinematic ballet, a film that, like the greatest of ballets, that manages to repeat itself over and over again but never grow tiresome.

 

Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and the KEXP blog.  He also has his own Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.   If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his writings here at Side One: Track One then please do so here.

- Noah Sanders -



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