Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky (2010)
In 1977 Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point aimed to domesticate ballet for mainstream American audiences. More than three decades later, we’re back to pathologising it – as the epitome of driven, loony perfectionism in the making of art, and perhaps (and perhaps less consciously on the part of the film-makers) as an illustration of the pernicious tendencies of European kultur. It’s not just the Manichean elements of Swan Lake that come in handy for Darren Aronofsky’s purposes: the artistic director of the production during which the ballerina Nina Sayers loses her mind is a martinet Frenchman. What’s disappointing about Black Swan – also, I guess, the secret of its success – is that it’s so leaden and humourless. It was obvious from the trailer that it was tosh but I was expecting, even though it’s an Aronofsky picture, self-aware and entertaining tosh. Instead, the grim, largely monotonous insistency reminds me of another heavy duty shocker The Exorcist which, on its release in 1973, was taken very seriously by its admirers – even though it seems to have become a camp classic with the passage of time. The New Statesman’s Sanjoy Roy describes Black Swan as ‘campily enjoyable’ but Roy is a ballet critic, not a film critic, and that isn’t why the film has garnered twelve BAFTA nominations, with Oscar nominations to be added to the tally tomorrow. These accolades are largely thanks to Aronofsky’s taking himself too seriously, and infectiously so. Although he’s a crude and uninteresting filmmaker, he has an acute commercial sense: he understands that people might like the idea of a ballet film but be bored by mere ballet. He’s spiced things up by making a horror movie set in the ballet world but he’s given it the solemnity of prestige, prize-hungry drama so that the audience can come out feeling they’ve partaken of art. His other means of persuading us that this isn’t just a recycling of backstage melodramas about dying for one’s art and stop-at-nothing theatrical rivalries include a good supply of fucks (in word and deed) and the camera lingering on naked female flesh as much as possible, in case the husbands that have got dragged along to the film are falling asleep. These things seem meant to give Black Swan a modernity that sets it apart from The Red Shoes and other forerunners.
I don’t know why I should feel sorry for Natalie Portman, who’s winning awards for her portrayal of Nina, but I do. Nina has for some years been a super-conscientious member of the corps de ballet in a company presumably meant to be the New York City Ballet. She’s now reaching the age where her chances of a starring role are receding fast and we see what lies ahead, in the persons of both her resentfully over-protective mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), who never became a star, and the has-been prima ballerina Beth (a cruelly cast Winona Ryder), who can’t face the wilderness decades now upon her. Beth is already an hysterical lush – even though she hasn’t quite retired until she breaks her legs in a traffic accident (or was it an accident?) Natalie Portman is getting plenty of praise because she did her own dancing in Black Swan but I think she’ll impress a lot of people just as much because her face, as the character offstage, resembles the received idea of a ballet dancer’s face on stage – a mask of tragedy. If the plot of Black Swan took off from the idea of Nina’s selling her soul to the devil by sleeping with Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the Svengali-cum-sergeant-major director, who’s promising a ‘stripped down, visceral’ version of Swan Lake which will rejuvenate the piece (Tomas doesn’t deliver on his promise), then the lurid, hallucinatory comeuppance Nina gets might be amusingly disproportionate. But Nina never seems sneakily or skilfully ambitious: she just seems unhappily desperate from the word go. She gets the part of Swan Queen not through going to bed with randy Thomas but by resisting him – with a bite on the lips – when he makes a pass at her, after she’s turned up to plead lamely with him to give her the role. He’d cast someone else because, although he can see Nina as the White Swan, he thinks her dancing is too ‘frigid’ and lacks the abandon needed for the Black Swan side of Odette/Odile. The bite changes his mind.
It’s an unhappy fact that one of the more convincing aspects of Portman’s portrait is that she accurately conveys the expressive limitations which have held back Nina’s career. And there’s no good reason – other than that it mirrors the acting limitations of many illustrious dancers – why the range of emotions her face expresses should be so limited too. As Lily, the little minx who becomes Nina’s understudy (on the eve of opening night) and nemesis, Mila Kunis at least proves it’s possible to play a professional ballet dancer and move your face like a human being. I’d expected Nina to become so malignantly obsessed with succeeding as the Black Swan that we’d see her grow into the role of heartless seductress which this ‘sweet girl’, as her mother calls her, has been told she can’t play; so that the supernatural appurtenances that her body starts to develop – the scratches on her back, the sharp black quills sprouting under her skin, the webbed feet – would be not only expressions of her obsessive identification with Odile but her just desserts. Natalie Portman doesn’t change, though, and she lacks the passionate mania needed to make Nina’s hideous metamorphosis seem either the price of fame or the manifestations of psychological breakdown. Her Nina is too weak a personality to deserve her fate and the doppelgänger aspect of the material isn’t developed in a way that allows Portman to play different characters. The double trouble is realised in purely visual terms, as Nina, in her paranoid imaginings and usually for a split-second at a time, sees her own face staring unnervingly at her, or the faces of her mother and Beth and Lily – members of a noxious sisterhood of lethal rivalry – imposed on her face or each other’s.
It’s a cliché that dancers will go to excruciating lengths to perfect what they do on stage and Darren Aronofsky exploits unpleasantly our ideas about practising hard enough to cause stress fractures and bloodshed: the gashed fingernails and bleeding toes, just the start of the mutilations and self-mutilations, are considerably harder to watch than the right arm coming off in 127 Hours. It might seem from this that Aronofsky has succeeded in making something irrefutably scary but it’s the physically horrible quality of the flesh wounds, rather than the horror of the ideas underlying them, that get to you. A drama-queenly woman just behind us at the Richmond Filmhouse (perhaps an ex-dancer herself: at one stage she had her leg up over the back of the seats on our row, as if to prove she could still do barre work) was clutching her head at the end of Black Swan – its dramatic power was all too much. (And it’s true that Aronofsky’s technique is concussive: Sally didn’t last much longer before walking out than she did with The Wrestler.) Sight and Sound praises Aronofsky for his brilliant originality in fracturing the formality of classical ballet by jagged editing (Andrew Weisblum) and hand-held cameras (Matthew Libatique is the DoP) but aren’t these techniques the most obvious way of making an impact? I found the pyrotechnics getting in the way of Benjamin Millepied’s choreography. The climax, in which Nina realises herself as the Black Swan, is thrilling not least because few other dance sequences in the film are.
The supporting characters aren’t nearly as entertaining as the archetypes they are might lead you to hope. Vincent Cassel, when he’s playing an English-speaking character, not only lacks incisiveness when he speaks the lines (in a synthetic, toneless voice); as Thomas (as in Eastern Promises), he seems physically diminished too. I liked the idea of the mother being potentially rabidly envious of her daughter – used to comforting Nina on not getting a big break, used to herself feeling comforted that her daughter isn’t getting that break. When Nina lands the Swan Queen, Erica buys a celebration cake which her calorie-phobic daughter refuses. This moment has a Wicked Queen vs Snow White/Sleeping Beauty appeal (and so evokes another nineteenth century ballet plot). I looked forward to its being the first of many attempts by Erica to sabotage Nina’s big chance but it’s never repeated, except in the comical moment when she assures Nina, after a very rough night before first night, that it’s OK: Erica has phoned work and told them that the star of the show is feeling off colour and won’t be in the office today. Barbara Hershey and Natalie Portman match up well as mother and daughter – and Hershey gives you a sense of where Portman got her glazed, on-the-edge-of-madness look from; but the mother would be much stronger if she was allowed to be engaging as well as alarming. There are one or two other moments which are inadvertently amusing: when Thomas tells the girls auditioning for the Swan Queen that those he’s touched should go to usual practice and those he hasn’t should come to see him in his studio later, we’re veering into X-Factor territory. The terrible screenplay – an original screenplay yet! – is by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin.
23 January 2011