Film Review | Black Swan

Now that the Oscar-winning horror thriller of the year has finally landed, is it worth the bother after all?

Alas, we got Black Swan too late to participate in its Oscar race. Now that we know how the heavily-nominated Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) psychological thriller took home Best Actress for its star Natalie Portman, I’m sure that a lot of you will be watching it with far less trepidation – which unfortunately often translates into a diminished excitement too – and simply go into it expecting… well, just a film, with just a single performance we’re meant to expect as being above average.

Which is just as well, because for all the hype (and Aronofsky’s stylistic frills), the film remains, above all, a very good horror film that doesn’t pretend to be much else.

The story should be familiar to you by now, so long has the film’s PR machine been in motion: Nina (Natalie Portman) is a young, beleaguered ballerina who risks sinking into mediocrity, as she has yet to impress her director, the leacherous Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel).

But when the company’s star ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder) retires, Nina gets a chance at a big break as Leroy gives her a shot at the lead role in the company’s upcoming production of Swan Lake.

But Nina’s innocent and rigid nature prevents her from being a shoe-in for the double-role of White and Black Swan: Leroy finds her to be a perfect fit for the former, while lacking the loose, dark energy essential for the Black Swan.

Nina’s primary competition turns out to be the newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) and when, in an innovative move, Leroy decides to split the roles of White and Black Swan, the pressure leads Nina to descend into what rapidly begins to resemble psychosis.

Portman’s career first catapulted to attention with a decidedly risqué move: she starred as an eventually murdering protégé to Jean Reno’s assassin character in Leon at the tender age of 12, and it wasn’t just the fact that she shot people that raised a few eyebrows – while Luc Besson’s thriller posited its leads as having a father-daughter relationship, a burgeoning sexual tension was uncomfortably palpable.

However, Leon onwards, both her professional and public personae were distinguished from her Hollywood colleagues as, well, being a bit uptight. Her most prominent role (if not the most dramatically weighty) was the austere, wooden-by-proxy Padme Amidala in the Star Wars sequels, while she played a string of concerned daughters/lovers in a forgettable number of dramedies. Closer was perhaps the exception, though even then: the adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play was a shouty, stiff affair, for all its nudity and swearing.

The fact that she felt the need to attempt what I can only refer to as ‘reverse-self-parody’ in a Saturday Night Live skit – where she engaged in an amusing rap replete with f-bombs and other gangsta stylings – is a testament to this fact.

In a lot of ways, Nina is that girl: naïve and uptight to near-paralysis, it’s an effort to get her going. So perhaps the Academy saw it fit to reward a dramatisation of this very development.

This would be a far-fetched idea were it not for the fact that Portman is in virtually every scene, and in close-up too. It’s easy to chew the scenery when you are the scenery. And just as James Franco had to carry the whole weight of 127 Hours on his shoulders (or, well, soon-to-be-severed arm), Portman has no excuses to be anything short of impressive. Professional ballerinas might complain about imperfect dance execution (as they have complained about the film’s caricatured portrait of ballerinas as hopelessly competitive neurotics)… but this is a horror film, and it bloody well works.

The setup and the characters (at the end of the day they all remain archetypes) are simple enough not to fail – Aronofsky is drawing on a rich tradition of psychodramas – everything from All About Eve to Rosemary’s Baby to his very own debut, Pi – and, coupled with a stylistic bravura we’ve come to expect from the director of Requiem for a Dream, the end result is a calculatedly polished piece of pulp cinema, with the occasional flourishes of genuine colour: watch out for a literalisation of Nina’s ‘transformation’ into the Black Swan, and the enchanting final set piece.

Who knew that the Academy – who pride themselves on middlebrow ‘message’ films – would pay so much attention to a refreshingly workmanlike, well-made piece of genre cinema?

Oh and in case you’re wondering about that much-hyped ‘Sapphic’ love scene, I’m afraid The Girl Who Played With Fire got it beat.