I was not surprised that Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan was a horror movie. I was surprised, however, that it was more or less only a horror movie. From the ads and the bit of critical response I read, I expected something more Yellow Wallpaper-y; a Gaslight style “is she crazy or isn’t she?” psycho-thriller.
The film however, commits early and rather explicitly to the idea that Natalie Portman’s Nina is crazy. The word “nightmarish” has been thrown around, and not without reason. The film has a dreamy sort of logic (or lack thereof) and creates a sense of claustrophobia as we see Nina going farther and farther into her own obsession and paranoia.
I love Swan Lake, and its presence in the film is gorgeously done. Though Nina is problematic, as I’ll discuss in a moment, Natalie Portman does well with what she’s given to work with, for the most part – she’s a little too trembly and whispery, but she does a lot of great nonverbal work. The supporting cast is excellent; Vincent Cassel is creepy, Barbara Hershey is a bit “mommie dearest” but mostly good, and I was pleasantly surprised by Mila Kunis.
There are some really visceral moments in the movie, which I won’t spoil here, but it really does succeed in being scary, at least for me. But the excellent execution can’t, for me, completely erase the underlying issues with the screenplay.
It’s not that I can’t enjoy movies if they have a less than enlightened view of gender – I am a James Bond fan, after all – but in Black Swan, the Madonna/whore dichotomy isn’t examined or undermined. It simply sits there, almost assumed. The repressed, virginal Nina can’t explore her sexuality without going from brittle to shattered; and while I thought that the film might eventually make a statement that violence, not sexuality, was the true darkness Nina is reaching for, all the actual violence in the film is directed inward. The self is the woman’s only possible target in this film, not just for Nina, but generally.
What frustrated me about Black Swan was that, with all sorts of fantastic elements working for it, I felt like the viewer knew oddly little about Nina, considering we’ve been trapped inside her mind the entire time. She isn’t much except a frame to display neuroses, and while she could work as a character in a different film, the center of this one feels oddly hollow.
While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think of two other films that clearly had to be influences and, sadly, both stand a bit better on their own for me. The first is the 1948 film The Red Shoes, which explores the tension and the tragedy of being driven to sacrifice any sort of personal happiness to attain artistic perfection. Vicky Page, the protagonist of that film, is just as haunted as Nina, but is the more tragic because she isn’t crazy. She is caught between art and personal happiness in a way that’s almost simplistic to the point of being archetypal. It’s a little dated, but still a good watch.
The other film, which has a much closer stylistic kinship to Black Swan, is Carlos Saura’s 1983 Carmen. The mixture of dance and plot is similar, with the dancers’ story echoing that of the piece they’re mounting. Also like Black Swan, the dance is the center of the story, weaving in and out but always drawing the characters and the viewer back in. However, the inter-character tension is all too real, and the way that the story mirrors life is both more direct and less heavy-handed. We don’t need the choreographer to explain the significance of the dance’s story; it becomes self-evident throughout the film, even if a viewer wasn’t familiar with the story of Carmen.
On the whole, I wasn’t sorry to see Black Swan, but I felt it was a squandered opportunity to explore some interesting themes in favor of just being creepy and shocking. There’s nothing wrong with either of those, but the film is very formulaic about female insanity in a way that is sometimes almost condescending.
Grade B – Well executed, but in need of a firmer, more thoughtful foundation.
The Exploding Macguffin 