Black Swan

A 2010 American Psychological thriller film that stars Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy) and Mila Kunis(Lily) and Winona Ryder which is directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Combine the wonderful sounds of orchestral music with the delicate beauty and undulating movements of the ballerinas along with the indelible images that cinema provides for us and we get a truly ambitious film that is a mixture of poetry, sex, feverish dream, nightmares, and psychology. But most impressively it is an innovative fusion — of cinema and ballet — that has been rarely seen in the film medium. Here is one of the most complete films in recent memory. A film well in accord with what makes a film great, ingraining in its foundation a surplus of great performances, visionary direction, emotional music, and surprises emerging from a unique script that is not afraid to approach the unconventional.

Resembling a “Red Shoes” on acid, “Black Swan” takes the idea of giving one’s all for art to a morbid extreme. Applying the gritty handheld technique he successfully employed in the working class environs of “The Wrestler” to the rarefied domain of classical ballet, Darren Aronofsky swooningly explores the high tension neuroses and sexual psychodrama of a ballerina on the brink of simultaneous triumph and breakdown. With Natalie Portman, in the demanding leading role, equaling her director in unquestioned commitment, the central issue for the viewer is how far one is willing to follow the film down the road to oblivion for art’s sake.

A scene from Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.”

The opposite end of such overwrought preoccupation lies in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous remark to one of his leading ladies who was becoming far too anxious about her performance: “Ingrid, it’s only a movie.” Certainly, the truth must lie somewhere in between; sometimes art just happens as if by alchemy, but more often it requires passion, obsession and giving yourself over to demons and dark instincts.

As every one of his films has demonstrated, Aronofsky is a serious, driven director interested in discovering and charting outer boundaries and “Black Swan,” which opened the Venice Film Festival and will move on to Telluride and Toronto, is no different. Natalie Portman’s Nina has poured her entire life’s energy into ballet, at the expense of all else. A grown-up girl who hasn’t lived, she still shares a small Upper West Side apartment with her suffocatingly adoring mother (Barbara Hershey), has childhood stuffed animals all over her room, has never had a serious relationship (her choreographer suspects she’s still a virgin) and seems to have no friends.

Nina may be the most tightly wound character I’ve seen in a movie since Peter O’Toole’s homicidal Nazi in “The Night of the Generals” 43 years ago. Often sweaty, given to unnaturally tense little intakes of breath (the soundtrack emphasizes this), plagued by rashes on her shoulderblades (where swans’ wings would sprout) and prone to poking, cutting and splitting her skin and nails, she is often told she should relax, that she’s way too uptight.

More to the point, she’s probably afflicted by sexual hysteria. Up for the lead in a new production of “Swan Lake” at Lincoln Center (where much of the film is set), Nina is told by the imperious French choreographer Thomas (a wonderfully commanding Vincent Cassel) that he’d cast her at once if all she had to dance was the White Swan; the insidiously seductive Black Swan, he fears, may be beyond her reach. To find out, he provokes her, taunting her to seduce him, to show him she has what it takes.

Nina wins the role without having to go that far (although many of her sister dancers believe it anyway) and practices relentlessly, to the point of breaking. When one star is born, however, a previous one must pass by the boards, in this case the aging Beth MacIntyre, played with an almost frighteningly credible neurotic intensity by Winona Ryder that sets the bar high for Portman to match.

Pushing herself into Nina’s life in a different way is company newcomer Lilly (Mila Kunis), who’s as loose and uninhibited as Nina is frigid and constipated. At first offering herself up as a friend, Lilly morphs into a conniving rival, at least in Nina’s mind, which brims with paranoid fantasies. Lilly also becomes a source of potential erotic pleasure, to the point where an intense girl-on-girl encounter seems to provide Nina with the physical breakthrough she’s needed, even if, again, this was just a figment of her dangerously accelerating imagination.