Black Swan

Natalie Portman makes out with Mila Kunis and turns into a bird. Also, I think there's some ballet in it.


I've got a lot of movies and animes and whatnot sitting on the back burner, waiting patiently for me to getting around to doing the reviews I want to do on them, but I saw a movie quite recently that I wanted to go ahead and jump into right away. It was just so... interesting that it's hard to wait. That movie was Black Swan.

That the film's central character is a ballet dancer and that the whole plot revolves around ballet dancing is sort of off-putting, and that's why I didn't pay much attention to Black Swan at first, but after hearing good things about it from other movie critics, one in particular, I decided to give it a shot. That one particular critic, incidentally, was Doug Walker, who does the Nostalgia Critic reviews over at That Guy With The Glasses. He mostly reviews bad movies (and for that matter he also mostly reviews old movies) but he mentioned in one video that he liked Black Swan. I've found in the past that we have similar opinions on movies... sometimes bizarrely so: he's the only other guy I know of who thought Hannibal Lecter was scarier in Red Dragon than he was in Silence of the Lambs. But anyway, I'm not here to plug his website. Moving on.

Black Swan does have a lot to do with ballet. For many of you, males in particular I suspect, this might make it hard to sit through. But suck it up, ya pansies, there's also a lot of creepiness, paranoia, disturbingly surreal imagery, and steamy lesbian sex. You'll survive, is what I'm saying. There's also a lot of similarities to one of my all-time favorite Japanese films, Perfect Blue (which was my first review on this very blog), which makes for a fascinating comparison. Both films are about female performers who get their big breaks and find the pressure too much to handle, causing them to crack and lose their hold on sanity. Even the names of the women are suspiciously similar: Perfect Blue starred Mima, whereas Black Swan centers on Nina.

Nina is played by Natalie Portman, and as I said before she's a ballet dancer. The film opens with Nina dancing a scene from Swan Lake in a pitch-black room, which I've got to say is pretty striking, visually speaking. I admit that I don't know shit about ballet, or Swan Lake in particular, but luckily the movie decides to throw all of us a bone and have the characters patronizingly explain every detail of the ballet's story. It's the kind of thing I would mock if people like me weren't the exact reason the writers had to throw it in there, and besides they actually manage to make the exposition dump feel halfway natural. So anyway, because of all that I can say that the scene she's dancing is the scene where the evil magician Rothfar casts a spell to turn the heroine into a swan. This is all a dream sequence, ultimately, but hey, foreshadowing! Hurrah!

As contrivance would have it, Nina's ballet company decides to open their new season with a re-imagining of Swan Lake that's going to be new and hip and dazzling somehow - I never got that impression from watching the final performance later on in the movie, but hey what do I know? Nina is chosen by the company's director, Tomas, to audition for the lead role, the Swan Queen. I suppose it would behoove me to repeat the movie's recap of the plot of Swan Lake: a young lady gets turned into a white swan by a dick of a magician, which can only be reversed by true love. What is it with evil curses and true love, anyway? Are they like acids and bases or something? I never did understand that. So the swan somehow wins the heart of a beautiful prince (don't think too hard about that), but then her evil twin (yes, I said evil fucking twin) the black swan seduces him and steals him away. This causes the white swan to despair and kill herself. The end.

Oh, by the way, no points for guessing how the movie ends.

So Tomas wants the white swan and black swan to be played by the same dancer, since they're twins, and... wait, I can't let this go. How the fuck are they twins? Were they human twins who were both turned into swans by evil magicians? Or was there some whore of a black swan who just decided in her Machiavellian little swan brain to impersonate the white swan just to dick with her? And by what perverse logic can a white swan and a black swan be considered identical? It makes no fucking sense!

*pant* *pant* ... OK, I think I'm good now.

Tomas tells Nina that she's perfect for the white swan because her dancing is precise and impeccable, but for the black swan she needs to "lose herself" in the role because the black swan is supposed to be passionate. Oh, God, as cliches go, this one's pretty overplayed, isn't it? The only way it could be worse is if he offered her the part in exchange for sex, then give her the part even after she refuses because she showed passion by hitting him and storming out of the room. That's the only way it could get more cliche. And of course, that's exactly what happens. Sigh. Oh well, I guess you can skimp a little on original writing when your main character turns into a bird in the climax.

As Nina prepares for the role, the pressure on her mounts, from the director, from her overbearing mother, and from the other dancers. All of the pressure seems to be manifesting itself as a rash on her back, just under her shoulder blade. Nina meets a new dancer named Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Lily seems to be her direct opposite: a fun, irresponsible free spirit. Nina doesn't seem sure what to make of her, but eyes her with distrust.

It's kind of hard to summarize this movie in terms of plot. It's not so much about a string of events happening as it is about watching Nina progressively fall apart. It really is a lot like Perfect Blue in that regard, only Perfect Blue had all of that murder stuff to keep track of as well. So, Black Swan is pretty much the same, except replacing murder with ballet. What the movie gives us instead of that string of happening events, though, is really very interesting. We get the ballet stuff, which obviously I don't care about - but I did happen to see this movie with my neighbor, who studied ballet years ago, and she loved that stuff. We get Tomas trying to draw out Nina's passionate side by trying to seduce her, ordering her to masturbate, and all sorts of other things that insufferable geniuses are allowed to do in movies without getting slapped or taken to court.

"It's cool... I'm a really good dancer."

There's plenty of stuff where Nina and her mother get into huge fights over astonishingly minor things, like her fingernails, or a goddamn cake. And best of all there are the sickening abnormalities with Nina's body. Her rash keeps getting worse, strange bumps appear and vanish, her eyes suddenly change color, even her toes start sticking together to form an amorphous glob of flesh. With the exception of the rash, these abnormalities disappear as abruptly as they happen, making it clear that she's hallucinating, not actually turning into a swan. Fine then, ruin my fun.

Things start coming to a head when Lily shows up at Nina's apartment to apologize for a minor mishap that happened earlier. Lily invites Nina to go out on the town with her, and Nina accepts the invitation just to annoy her mother. Just to be clear: regardless of what her behavior implies, Nina is not fifteen years old. The two girls go out and Lily tries to get Nina to take some kind of pill to help her relax. Nina turns it down, then goes to the bathroom and returns to catch Lily emptying the pill into her drink. Holy Disco Jesus, lady! Look, I always try not to talk about my gender in terms of unfair and hurtful stereotypes, but the fact of the matter is there are a lot of guys out there date-raping women. In that kind of dangerous environment, a girl has to be careful, so it really would be nice if you ladies could look out for each other. Or failing that, at least avoid date-raping to each other. That's not so much to ask, right? By some inscrutable train of thought, though, Nina decides that this proves that she really needs the drugs after all, and willingly drinks the drink. The rest of the evening is a blur of dancing and sex. The next thing she knows she's back home with Lily in her bedroom, and they decide to get freaky.

I believe a "bow-chicka-wow-wow" is in order.

This is the kind of scene that makes you feel strangely dirty. Bear in mind, there's not a jot of actual nudity in this movie. Not so much as a single bare backside. I guess combining explicit sex and nudity would probably push the film into the dreaded NC-17 rating, which has been considered a death sentence for movies ever since the disastrous failure of Showgirls... which proves yet again how Elizabeth Berkley ruins everything.

Everything.

Given that nudity was where they drew the line, this kind of intense girl-on-girl lovin' scene stands out in a weird way. There have been a small number of instances wherein a certain sentence has crossed through my brain, and one such instance was when I saw this scene. That sentence is, "Wow, I'd probably feel less uncomfortable watching this if it was actually porn." Because porn is porn; there's no mystery or subtlety about what people are watching it to see. People are watching it to see some people fuckin'. Everything makes sense and all's right with the world. But a movie like this, the writers and producers had to go out of there way to throw in a scene of two girls gettin' it on, and they had to put in tons of effort to make it extremely sexy without showing off any of the girls' actual naughty bits. All I'm saying is that putting that much effort into a sex scene would feel less creepy if the movie was about sex, instead of.... you know, ballet. But damn it all if this scene isn't offensively brilliant, continuing to mix in the delusional and symbolic imagery even as it blurs the line between cinema and smut.

Nina wakes up alone, and late for rehearsal. She shows up and belatedly yells at Lily for spiking her drink. Yes, how dare she offer you drugs that you ingested of your own free will! This is clearly all her fault! But as for the sex it turns out that part was all a dream. Ah, the old "Mila Kunis goes down on Natalie Portman" dream... I know it well. But I don't see why she gets so embarrassed about it. At least her version doesn't involve the bungie straps, the plastic cups, and the weasel. As she goes through the final rehearsals and prepares for opening night, her delusions get more intense and she becomes convinced that Lily is trying to replace her as the swan queen. And when I say that the delusions get more intense, I mean that from this point on the movie goes full paranoia and it gets tricky to tell what's really happening and what's not. For instance, Nina's been stealing shit from another dancer throughout the movie - makeup, earrings, that kind of stuff. When her reflection starts to act on its own accord and people start turning into other people, she has an attack of conscience and returns everything. The other girl responds by taking a nail file and stabbing herself in the face, repeatedly.First of all, holy fuck what's wrong with you?! Second, did that really happen or did she imagine it? I'm still not sure.

Nina gets back home just to have a disturbing freak-out, during which she sees black feathers sprouting out of her back and her legs suddenly reverse themselves. She wakes up later with her mother sitting beside her, insisting that she drop out of the performance. Nina refuses and storms out, down to the theater. She arrives just in time to keep Lily from taking her place in the opening performance. The Swan Lake music begins to play, and try to keep in mind that from this point on the music does. not. stop. And it's not in the background, either; it's loud, and insistent, and deliciously unsettling.

Nina dances the white swan part impeccably, but in the final scene her partner drops her. She's so humiliated that she's in tears as she returns to her dressing room to change into her black swan costume. Lily is there waiting for her, taunting her and suggesting that they switch for the second act. It comes to blows, and Lily suddenly transforms into Nina's double. They fight, until Nina stabs her double with a shard of broken glass.

I'm not going to harp on this, but wasn't a shard of broken glass what took out Mima's evil double in Perfect Blue? Yes... yes I believe it was.

Nina stashes the body in the bathroom and goes out to dance the black swan part. Now there's a girl who's got her priorities straight. Report the second-degree murder that just occurred? Get rid of the evidence in hopes of escaping justice? No, the show must go on. Too wrapped up in the "Oh shit I just murdered somebody" mindset to obsess over her dancing, Nina finally loses herself in the role and becomes the black swan.

No, I mean she actually becomes a black swan.

As the audience cheers ecstatically, Nina kisses Tomas backstage and returns to her dressing room to change back into the white swan costume for the finale. As she's changing, there's a knock on the door. She opens it to find Lily standing there, cheerfully congratulating her on her performance. Confused, Nina checks the bathroom, and sure enough there's no body to be found. Knowing for damn sure that she stabbed somebody with a shard of glass, she looks around until she finally notices the gushing wound in her own abdomen. Slowly she realizes that in her madness she has inflicted a mortal injury upon herself, and in the wake of that revelation... she sits down and finishes putting on her makeup. That, my friends, is an absolutely chilling scene. She tells no one about her injury, and dances the finale of the ballet to perfection. Only when the performance ends, with the white swan jumping to her death, do her colleagues see the wound and realize what's happened to her. As Tomas frantically calls for help and asks her how it happened, she only says, "It was perfect." The lights come up and the screen fades to white.

Ouch. That's a harsh ending. As bad as Perfect Blue was, with the serial killings and rape scenes and whatnot, at least... at least it had a happy ending (...more or less). Here we get tragedy at its most pure. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Tragedy has its place, and Black Swan was a perfect movie to get a tragic ending. I guess that's the ultimate difference between the two films. One was set up to get a good ending, and the other was set up for a bad ending. Perfect Blue also had much faster pacing and more action, but it all sort of stems from that one major difference. In Perfect Blue we're watching Mima overcome her problems, but in Black Swan we're watching Nina's problems overtake her. It calls for a few differences in pacing and tone. Both films work.

Having said that, Black Swan does suffer a bit from starting out awfully slow. It's a gradual build, starting out fairly ordinary and growing more surreal as the pressure builds and Nina's psyche crumbles, but I found myself getting impatient at times, sitting through the normal stuff and waiting for the crazy stuff that I knew was coming. I think if someone started watching this movie thinking it was an ordinary movie about ballet, it might fail to convince them otherwise in time to keep them from losing interest. The last third of the movie is brilliantly creepy, though, and well worth the wait. And it isn't as though the first two thirds are devoid of entertainment. They're simply a well-made and vaguely foreboding movie about ballet.

The Oscar nominations for 2010 haven't been made yet, but this one's generating some buzz, and I expect it to take home a few when all's said and done. It's a remarkable piece of film, and something I have to recommend based on its intellectual depth and striking visual appeal. It's rare that I get to say that about an American production, so I'm pleased as punch to see Black Swan get the appreciation that it's gotten. Watch this film, if you get a chance. It'll be well worth never being able to look at reality the same way again.

Black Swan is the property of Fox Searchlight Pictures, Protozoa Pictures, and Phoenix Pictures. Images used from Black Swan, Looney Tunes, and Armitage III: Poly-Matrix