The Black Feather Needs No Shadow

Black Swan

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Here is what the movies are for. Here is what can be done in their world alone. What a grand and beautiful folly is Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan”, a film that casts aside expectations and conventions and sets off in wild search of the muse. Freed from restraint, unburdened with pretensions, and stripped of formality, here is a movie that loses itself thrillingly in a sustained act of psychological seduction. It is a brave and fearless film.

“Black Swan” is composed almost exclusively of pairs – repeating themes, doppelgangers, alternates, reflections, life mimicking art, art mimicking life, black and white. It centers on a New York Ballet Company’s modernized production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” – “visceral and real,” we are assured - and is nothing if not a modernization of that tale in and of itself. The story, for those who do not know, tells of a woman trapped in the body of a white swan - a curse that only true love can break. She falls for a handsome prince, but the Black Swan, her evil twin, reaches him first and seduces him. Defeated, the White Swan leaps from a cliff and finds freedom, finally, in death.

But while Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the virginal White Swan of Aronofsky’s film and newly cast as the lead of the same fate in the production, sees her own evil twin in many places  (her oppressive mother, an intimidating new rival within the company, the sinister retired leading lady) trying to come between her and her long-awaited shot at perfection, the real Black Swan is Nina’s own inner demons, transforming this film into a parable about the sacrifices made in pursuit of high art, about madness, life, death, celebrity, ambition, obsession. About us, even, for our culture needs the Icarus-like rise and fall of its icons to satisfy its ravenous narcissism.

Of all the parallels to be made between this film and the ballet at its epicenter, the most pressing is the extraordinary difficulty of their leading roles. The trick to “Swan Lake” is that the White Swan and Black Swan are both played by the same actress, an expression of the dichotomy of human nature and sexual repression. The dimensions of Nina’s character seem bottomless upon inspection. Mrs. Portman has been tasked with playing a gifted dancer who dances first with too much control and then without any at all, who loses her grip on reality and loses herself in her performance, and must evoke these states of mind largely through the choreography of one of the most difficult roles in all of the theater. Try and imagine the scope of this accomplishment, knowing that Portman had only begun to learn ballet a mere ten months prior to shooting.

Portman plays Nina as a somewhat chaste being, but certainly not a pure one. She is obsessed with the ballet, narrow-minded to the point of social ineptitude, probably because her mother (Barbara Hershey) has deprived her of every other social setting, and we catch a hint of cutthroat tunnel vision in her. There is a strained sexual tension between her and the director at the company, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), but Nina is so petrified of social contact that she seems almost sexually dysfunctional, Sexuality, though, she will find increasingly difficult to repress.

For all the criticisms railed on her by Thomas - that she is too frigid, that she is cowardly, inhibited, that she cannot embody the insatiable lust of the Black Swan - the newcomer from the west coast, Lily (Mila Kunis), seems to have mastered all the areas of Nina’s shortcomings. Is she plotting to steal the role away? And what of Beth (Winona Ryder), the aging star of the company forced into a suspicious retirement? She is tormented by her age, and if she cannot punish Nina for the inevitable consequences of time then self-mutilation seems an appropriate alternative.

Nina is a girl of tremendous isolation. Even within the arms of dance partners she seldom notices the faces of others. It is possible that she has spent more time looking at her own face in the mirror than she has at anyone she’s ever known, studying her imperfections, fantasizing about perfection, but even her own reflection betrays her, twisting and scowling independently. The faces she does see, and that the film actually regards, are strictly those faces that pose a threat to her success. There are the macabre marks on her shoulder blades. Her mother accuses her of nervous scratching, though we never see it. Her mother’s paintings, all off-putting self-portraits, wink and tweak and shutter at her. Her reflection breaks free from mirror surfaces and appears on the faces of strangers, rivals, sexual fantasies.

“Black Swan” is loaded with subtle directorial flourishes, the minute smile and chuckle of a single painting in a room full of abstract faces, the ripple of emerging gooseflesh, but my favorite stylistic decision was the manner by which Aronofsky conveyed the two different dancers, Nina and Lily. As Nina dances, her face trembling, her body stiff and nervous, focused on making every movement precise and perfect, Thomas bemoans her emotional ambivalence and the camera follows her in tight, jerky movements, seeming almost to quiver when in place. But notice how gracefully and sensually the camera follows Lily through her routines, as though it were dancing with her. “She isn’t faking it,” Thomas notes, and Aronofsky has tricked us into agreeing with him. Because the film remains subservient to Nina’s perception, her insecurities are manifested in its visual style and she sees Lily as a superior dancer to herself. This is virtuoso filmmaking.

And so the pairs continue. There are two fundamental components to Nina’s decline, and thus also to Aronofsky’s fable. The first is the literal component, that Nina was a paranoid schizophrenic prone to violent hallucinations, both visual and audible, which became an extension of her own immersion in the role of the Swan twins. Even the black and white palette that originated in Tchaikovsky’s ballet and extends itself into Aronofsky’s visual aesthetic is a diagnosable symptom of schizophrenia, in such instances that the divided mind segments and separates all things into diametrically perceived opposites. I doubt very much that this detail was lost on such a director. The film manages the delicate task of navigating these hallucinations without ever cheating – a rare feat.

The second, though, is what elevates “Black Swan” into the realm of high tragedy – the allegorical component - that Nina’s hallucinations serve as a metaphor for human sacrifice in the pursuit of great art, and here is where the true genius of the film begins to shine. Aronofsky has reversed the roles of these two components, treating Nina’s schizophrenia abstractly while approaching her allegorical transformation, in this case into an actual swan, literally. In the end the two are equal parts indistinguishable and intertwined, the thesis of the work being that ambition and obsession are similar traits indeed, and very possibly dependent on one another.

To quote, of all people, Rob Zombie, “Art isn’t safe.” Nina chases her eternally elusive “perfection” beyond the ends of sanity, and Aronofsky takes us with her. It is one thing to go over the top. Aronofsky turns his back on the top altogether and travels as high as he damn well pleases. After all, his film is about a girl who does just that, and he takes it upon himself to follow. The result is a twisted tragedy, a ravishing melodrama, an overdose of pathos on the stage of the absurdist comic theater.

The role of the artist is that of the sacrificial lamb, of the pioneer, the explorer of the soul. They all seek what Nina seeks – spiritual liberation, new soil – but this is often all they are left with. There are the tools of the art, the language, the formulas, but transcendence depends on more than conventions. This is the sin for which Nina spends the whole of the film seeking to repent. Art isn’t safe. Artists see barriers as objects to be broken. Often this is not an act of beauty. Nina’s quest for perfection was selfish and self-serving. She sought perfection for her own sake. She alone wanted to enjoy the fruits of her own victory. She could not have her cake and eat it too.

I find myself closing this review with my favorite fable, because it has never been so pertinent to a film I have reviewed, and because “Black Swan” is itself a fable and the correlation between the two is simple, and seems to have waited a long time for me to make it.

It is the story of the child protégé piano player, who at the age of thirteen had already achieved world renown and played in front of great crowds who paid great money to see him. By his own request he found himself with a chance to sit down before an old master and play for him. The piece he was to play was considered among the most difficult ever written. The master sat in his favorite armchair, before the child’s pristine grand piano, and listened intently as he played. The child never missed a note. His dynamics were flawless, his tonality precise, and when he was done he looked at the old master with great satisfaction. The old master sat in silence for several moments. Finally he explained, “You know the notes, my boy. Maybe someday you’ll know the music.”

December 20, 2010