BLACK SWAN Discussion

Career-best is high praise. Can't wait.

This is a must-see for me, based on my Twitter feed last night as people came out. One guy, whose favorite movie of all time is THE FOUNTAIN, said he seriously had to think about whether or not this movie topped it for him.

Eh, it's a movie about ballet. Any movie about that subject that doesn't reference THE RED SHOES probably isn't doing it right.

Review: http://chud.com/articles/articles/26...WAN/Page1.html

Another home run for Aronofsky, another home run for Renn Brown.

Well-written review, Renn. Got me salivating.

Well, if anyone was worried that CHUD had somehow lost its quality, I would like to present exhibit A. You have gotten me so fucking stoked for this movie, and I was already so fucking stoked, so that's like...twice as much or something.

Your intro alone nails how great it is and pretty much exactly mirrors my feelings about it, and as you go on to elaborate it's all spot on and really well written. Awesome work.

The other thing I loved about the film, which you hint at, is how it makes ballet visceral to the viewer. The filmmaking is unobtrusive about it but you get a very intimate sense of the physicality of dance and there are these awesome moments where the camera takes off and moves with the dancers as they rehearse and perform, and in at least a few instances even goes into their POV, and it really makes you feel it in a way that only THE RED SHOES has done for me before.

I agree. The review for Black Swan reads like a literature...you guys hit it out of the park.

Thirded. Or fourthed. Whatever, that's outstanding work, Renn.

While it sounds af if the former is the case, I can confirm the second part as the truth.

This review was a real joy to read and now I'm absolutely excited to see this film. Great stuff, Renn.

Just another high-five for the review, Renn. It's Aronofksy, so I'm going to see it, but a great review like this really helps prime me for the film.

I just want everybody to know that I bought Renn's Futurama back in the day.

Mmkay.

That was me. NOT YOU ME.

Thanks guys, I was happily surprised to see such a strong response, doubly so for the positivity of the comments on the article page.

The film deserves it.

Just echoing the compliments. Great review, Renn.

I saw it, and I wasn't that impressed. I've spent about a week thinking it over, and I've tracked down more than a handful of people on Twitter or AIM to talk about it. I'll probably see it again before writing a full review, but here's the gist of my problems.

Cinematical's Scott Weinberg Tweeted that it was like "Fight Club for girls." Not the example I would use, but still usable enough to extract my issue from. Both the Narrator and Nina are driven to create these psychological delusions in order to temporarily mend their breaking psyche, but Fight Club tells you so much more about the Narrator than Black Swan tells you about Nina. The Narrator is falling prey to what society says is success, and starts to go numb, so he turns to the support groups, where he meets Marla, and perhaps Marla is his ticket to happiness or sanity. But what does Nina get out of dancing? Why is perfection so important to her? Why does she toil at it endlessly?

It's tragic to watch the dream-filled, mostly innocent protagonists of Requiem for a Dream get sucked into the void, chewed up, and spit out. It's heartbreaking to see Randy the Ram trying to piece his life back together, and falling a few bandages short. However, without any knowledge of who Nina is as a person and/or what joy or happiness it brings her to dance, and dance perfectly, it's hard to relate. Thomas Spurlin was telling me he knows people like Nina, and having that affect the experience of the movie makes perfect sense, but it seems unfair to credit the movie with that.

Another major factor is that, whether the audience is willing to accept it or not, I think Black Swan has a tragically happy ending. Nina spends the movie trapped between her awful mother, her disappointed teacher, and her horrible future, as embodied by Winona Ryder. Even though the performance comes at the expense of her life, she gets exactly what she wants, a perfect performance (made additionally sad, because it's not perfect; the one guy drops her) and is free of all other futures. As a rational person, of course, I know it's not worth it to give up your life to get one thing you want, but what else does Nina have to look forward to? Black Swan "starts" so late in the game that Nina's already past some point of no return, and there don't really seem to be any outs for her.

I definitely don't think this is a bad movie. I think Vincent Cassel's commanding performance is going to get overlooked, but he intriguingly walks the line between sleazebag and compelling director, never stepping too obviously into one camp or the other. The last scene with Winona Ryder in the hospital, when she has the knife, is one of the most terrifying visuals I've seen all year. And, in all aspects, but most alarmingly, the expression of her character's emotional state through her physical appearance, Natalie Portman's performance is crazy. I watched Black Swan a day or two after the Your Highness trailer hit, and she looks sexy, vibrant and even a bit muscled up. Comparatively, she's a husk, every wrinkle showing, every muscle strained, every hair pulled back.

But as good as all of that is, it doesn't engage me with the film or the characters. The bird sound effects throughout were kind of on-the-nose, the parallels to Swan Lake are simple, and ultimately, while the creepy reveals of what's really going on in the third act get under the skin a little bit, Nina's decision just doesn't affect me that much. It's tragic, sure, but it's like it happened to a stranger. It's like I've read it in the paper.

That is a great counterpoint review to Renn's great effusive review.

I saw this at a screening on Tuesday (incidentally, screening audiences are the worst. THE WORST). I've been letting it settle for the last few days--my initial impression was closer to Tyler's, and it hasn't changed much since. But I also cannot get Portman's performance out of my head. She really puts her body and soul into it like nothing I've seen her in before. But the movie has excellent turns across the board, as well.

As Tyler said, it may be a bit too operatic and on-the-nose for me to find much else to dig into, but I think it's a film that is going to stay with me, visually and emotionally.

Aronofsky is smart enough to know there is no freaking way you can make a movie about ballet without people thinking about That Ballet Movie ,and so rather then a futile attempt to avoid referencing it, you try to come up with a really good homage to it,which he has apparently done.
My Wife and I often have different tastes in movies, but she is a Ballet buff, and That Other Ballet Movie is one of her favorite films, and she is dying to see this.

I admit, having discussed it with people multiple times since my first viewing, that maybe it's more compelling as a metaphor than I gave it credit for. But I see no reason it couldn't have also had an equally strong character thrust, especially given that I felt that from Aronofsky's other films.

I just got home from seeing it.

Wow...

...wow.

Every single Aronofsky film, I don't breathe the last 20 minutes or so. I am mentally and emotionally drained. What an amazing filmmaker!

That just about sums it up.

I saw it today, liked it a lot. What's fascinating to me is that for about the first hour and change, I actively started to hate it. I was never a fan of REQUIEM because it had nowhere to go. but Aronofsky had me with THE FOUNTAIN and THE WRESTLER. I thought whilst watching this "well, maybe FOUNTAIN was a fluke... wait, WRESTLER."

But then the third act kicks into gear, and the film became a meditation on creating art, which is when I fell for it... though I doubt it will make my top ten. It's a really good movie, though. That said, Aronofsky didn't stage the dancing with any great pizazz. He did better than David O. Russell re: boxing, but still.

First off: Woah.

A few things. I loved this film. Loved it, loved it. For me personally, some of the dance scenes were breathtaking. The one in the beginning (her dream), and the final dance as the Black Swan gave me legitimate shivers. Some really beautiful camera work.

I loved the uses of the duality throughout the film, the constant use of mirrors and reflections even before Portman starts to lose it.

I have so many more thoughts and feelings from this film, but I'm honestly still a bit shaken up to really put them into coherent words.

Saw it with a bunch of friends of mine and we all thought the same thing. It was visually breathtaking and well acted but very slight on the script side. I really didnt think it added up to much story wise and I was frankly baffled why we learned nothing about the nina character. We never find anything about her home life or why her mom acted so crazy most of the time. All we really knew about the Nina character is that she was driven which is fine but I wanted a lot more rounding out.

Still worth it for the visuals alone.

While I understand what you are saying, ultimately I have to disagree. I was glad there wasn't a lot of expositional dialogue with Nina and her mother. There wasn't the usual "I do this because ______!" or "I have to be perfect because_______!" that is often showed in Oscar-baity dramas. The movie was quiet dialogue-wise, but a lot can be learned about the characters and their relationships from some of the conversations. As far as Nina's drive and her relationship with her mother I think a lot of their backstory was fleshed out subtlety. Ultimately I think Nina's drive comes from the pressure heaped on her by her mother and some kind of guilt for being the reason her mother had to end her career as a dancer. Her mother is portrayed as a bit of a psycho, but that seems to stem from the fact that Nina herself is unstable, especially if she has had trouble with scratching herself in the past. It seems to me that the tense relationship between Nina and her mother is a cyclical pattern of pressure, with Nina's flaws feeding into her mother's overbearing nature, which in turn makes Nina even more damaged. By looking at the film this way it can be viewed as perhaps the climax of this relationship and the ultimate realization of the destructive relationship the two have together.

I hear there is some gore near the end. Are we talking "suffering for the art" kind of stuff or serious blood spatter? Not sure I want to see blood flying all over the place.

There are certainly some scenes that can make one feel a bit queasy and some "spatter" but ultimately I would classify it as "suffering for the art." It's not gory in the way a Saw film is gory, but there are certainly some images that are a bit tough to watch.

That's actually one of the things I loved about the film. We are only told what we need to know. Backstory and explanation, to a certain extent, are unnecessary.

Her Mom is a former dancer who never made it beyond a certain level, and is living through her daughter. That's all we need to know. We can't trust anything we learn about the Mom (or other characters) because the whole movie is from Nina's perspective (that's established from the very beginning, with the camera constantly over her shoulder). Nina's perspective is skewed, so we can't really trust how she interprets the actions of others.

Hmm...almost reminds me of Mulholland Drive in a way.

How can I emotionally invest in a complete stranger? Especially a complete stranger who I don't like very much? I don't need the movie to spell things out for me, but if I don't know much about Nina, it's hard to care about what happens to her. For me, anyway.

yet I was more emotionally invested in Muholland Drives characters which was a much more surreal film.

And I don't need extreme backstory and exposition but a more well developed character would have been nice.

Again, I'm not sure what it means when people are saying "more developed." Nina is distant, emotionally cold, calculating, and ultimately somewhat dull. But that is the point of the film. It's about her letting go of that, about her evolving into something more sporadic and dangerous and sensual. There is a lot of distance emotionally in the first half, but this is something I see as being a vital part of the film to express the shocking nature of Nina's transformation.

ETA: This is really stressed throughout the film, not just in the way she acts but in the way she dances. Ultimately the criticism I have of this film (and it's small) is that perhaps the metaphor of Nina's dancing as representing her life is a little too blunt. But I don't think the weakness lies in character development.

I don't have a focused rebuttal for this response, plus I've just woken up from a nap, so my thought process is a bit hazy, but how hard is it for Nina to give in? Cassel yells at her and yells at her, and eventually I wanted to yell at her. I don't know ballet; she does the dance over and over again, but it's really hard for me to see any difference, and that might've helped a little. The film never seems to want to toe the line, in my opinion. Maybe one major dance sequence with Lily, done with all the seduction that Cassel's character wants, would've provided more of a goal for me to see Nina striving to achieve. Or I would've liked to see some sort of failed attempt she has with Cassel, where she tries to loosen up but way overdoes it.

Ultimately, based on your statements, I think maybe a redefinition of my problem with her character is that a writer writes a story knowing what's going to happen, but knowing what's going to happen in the plot doesn't dictate a character's actions. Something about the way Aronofsky boxes Nina in takes so much control away from her. I mean, she's a helpless person, but I never see her making decisions; there's so little wiggle room between the the places the movie is destined to go and the options available to Nina that it rarely feels like she had any part in getting where she gets or doing what she does as opposed to Aronofsky arriving at the point or statement he's trying to make. In that sense, she becomes less of a character and more of a plot device.

I don't see how the things you're describing aren't character traits. She's childlike, timid, psychologically and emotionally fragile and allows herself to be controlled by others. That's the character, not a plot device - to me the character drives the movie, not the other way around. And it should feel constricting or claustrophobic, perhaps even frustrating. Isn't that the point? This is a person who has led a boxed in life, and it's pushed her to the edge. So in the last act she 1.) begins to assert some independence and control over her life and 2.) gives herself over to her art.

Some of the other things you're mentioning just sound like how you would have done things differently, not flaws in the movie. She does the dance over and over but can't break through that wall of cold technical perfection. That's the plot. You see the difference in the last performance. Lily doesn't get a whole dance setpiece to show off her seductiveness but she doesn't need to because it's there whenever she's on screen (including one or two key moments highlighting how she's different from Nina as a dancer specifically). Nina doesn't really overdo it but we definitely see her failing to make that emotional breakthrough in front of Cassell. Etc.

I disagree. She has all of those traits, but I still feel like somehow she ends up in settings and positions that Aronofsky has placed her. If each scene was a maze, it'd be like it was designed with three routes, and then Aronofsky placed her 75% of the way down one of the routes when the scene begins. As an audience member, I can see those other routes were available, but we weren't around when she chose to go most of the way down one. True. I'm not sure specifically what it is the movie doesn't have that I feel it's lacking, so I'm just throwing out ideas and maybe someone will be able to articulate it better than I can. Sure, it's the plot, but without "something", whatever it is I'm missing...it's like, what's going on in Nina's head? Since I can't tell the difference between attempt A and attempt B, is she, say, trying to get him to accept her version by just doing it until he caves, or is she really pushing herself? If she is, how much? If she isn't, why not? Is she afraid to push herself, i.e., she knows and could do what he wants and is resisting, because maybe even she knows it will break her psyche, or just too repressed? Even if the general picture of Nina being unable to do it is present, I feel like a little more detail about how she approaches her work, some of her perspective, would've made so much difference.

And yes, I can tell that it's different at the end, because she turns into a bird. I honestly don't know what the difference is otherwise; if she's a little slinkier or relaxed, it's extremely minor.

No offense, but it seems like you want spelled out what's there in every action she takes. Her perfectionism, not as spelled out by Cassell, is highlighted by the contrast will Lily. Lily is late, misses her stop, Nina doesn't. Lily bumps into one of the other dancers while practicing, Nina doesn't. Nina's face while she dances is fearful, she's always afraid of something, Lily is cavalier, and alive, full of personality and sensuality. Nina is uncomfortable talking about sex, Lily is a floozy. This is all onscreen, all in behavior and acting, not plot.

Her face, the entire film, is one of fear. At the end, during the black swan dance, her demeanor changes. Her eyes and lips become dark and full of lust. It underscored for me just how great Portman's acting was, because even before the transformation into a swan I could see it in her face.

This is valid as well, but a part of what you are stating as a flaw seems to be a purposeful portrayal of Nina's headspace. It's so frustrating seeing Cassel constantly tell her "attack it, sexier, give in, etc." He keeps saying it. It's unbearably frustrating for the audience because it is for Nina, and that's what makes it so thrilling when she finally lets go.

As far as the difference between her less and more successful performances, dance is one art form that I just don't "get." One thing that really helped me understand the beauty of the final Black Swan dance was the fluidity of the camera, and ultimately the physical transformation of Nina during the number. As someone who couldn't tell a good ballet number from a bad, I definetly got a sense of freedom from that final dance that I hadn't felt in her other rehearsal dances.

I don't need the movie to more blatantly detail her perfectionism. I need to know what Nina thinks or feels about her perfectionism. If her perfectionism is given little more emotional thrust than reflex, that seems like not enough to me. Synecdoche, New York comes to mind. Hoffman's character is desperate for perfection in his film he can't get out of his own life. Nina is desperate for perfection because...perfection is good?

I have yet to see Synecdoche, New York so I can't really comment upon that, but I would go so far as to compare Nina's passion and desire to that of Randy 'The Ram' in The Wrestler. Both characters are part of a world that is very small and very foreign to a lot of people; the inner world of professional wrestling and elite levels of ballet. Both characters have devoted their lives to their passion and have sacrificed their bodies. Nina's sacrifice is constantly highlighted by the shots of her strained body. There is nothing else in her life except dancing, there never has been. Perfecton is the only thing she desires, because there is nothing else in her life.

I think she is desperate for perfection, like I said, from the guilt of being the reason her mother had to stop dancing and from the constant pressure heaped upon her from her mother and people involved in her life.

In the end I feel like the two of us had completely different readings of the film and had different senses of what the film was trying to do, and that's fine. I really don't know if either of us are right or wrong, but I certainly love that a film like this gives a lot to chew on.

I suppose, but The Wrestler does comparatively what I feel is a great job filling Randy in. He's a self-destructive lout who's ruined all of his relationships and can't stay on track long enough to repair them. He gives himself completely over to wrestling because he knows he's good at it, and most importantly, that he'll only hurt himself. I feel like I know a lot about Randy. The movie never shows us anything about Nina aside from ballet.

Exactly. There IS nothing else.

Randy revels in Wrestling because he sucks at everything else. Nina tries to be a perfect Ballerina because there is nothing else in her life, it is her raison d'être, which is simultaneously what keeps her from being perfect.

The movie gives us plenty to chew on as to why there is nothing else in her life.

An ex-girlfriend of mine used to opine that you can't be both perfect at what you do for a living and fully adept in the other areas of your life. Too much energy in one will inevitably be to the detriment of the other. This film is the embodiment of that. Except great art expects more than technical perfection, thus Nina's conundrum.

Yeah, but again, the movie gives you reasons for Randy, shows you reasons. Where Randy is at the end of The Wrestler is where Nina starts. I guess that bothers me. Seems like a cheat.

Randy is old, Nina is still young. Randy fucked everything else in his life up and retreated to his work, the one place he felt good about himself. NINA NEVER HAD ANYTHING ELSE. And we are given reasons for why that's the case (her mother, who has controlled her her entire life with emotional manipulation).

By that logic, no "I fucked my life up" stories could be told about young people and no "I never had anything else obsession" stories could be told about old people.

In any case, I feel like your argument ultimately turns out to be "you don't have a person to care about in Black Swan because there is no person to care about" (and, maybe also that that in and of itself should make me sympathetic). I never said it was a bad movie, but I found Aronofsky's others far more emotionally engaging, and I think Black Swan could've had both.

I don't think that's fair. It's just that here we have a character who, by implication, never made her own decisions. So you faulting the film for never showing us her decision making process is a misread of what's going on, imo.

It's funny because your issue with this movie is EXACTLY my issue with The Fountain, a film that used its characters as a vessel for its themes while leaving them undeveloped as characters (though I admit I still really enjoy that film). Except here I feel the lack of depth to the character is warranted because it is the character.

If that doesn't change your mind, we'll have to agree to disagree

Hey, whatta ya know, a valid discussion of the legitimate merits merits of a film! On the internet!

Seriously, you both have good points.

That being said, I'ma side with JudL here, mostly because, for however underdeveloped certian aspects of Nina and her motivation are, the film is too damn visceral for me not to love. I got the same feeling of utter excitement just watching Portman (who's never really had much effect on me before) just act as I did Rourke in the Wrestler (though I will cede that his character is more fleshed out and sympathetic). Aranofsky might be the best actor's director working right now.

Add to that the other aspects of the movie that just completely drew me in: body horror ala Cronenberg, psychological schisms ala Lynch, mental deterioration and sexual frustration being one with each other ala Polanski, backwards bending knees ala Twohy = favorite movie of the year thus far.

Also, Vincent Cassel really knocked it out of the park here, taking a character that could have just been a scumbag and making me actually feel for/admire the guy. Bravo all around.

What has really been going through my head the last couple of days has been the use of reflection throughout the film. Any film that spends alot of time in a dance studio is naturally going to incorporate mirrors, but the use of refelections and mirrors extended far beyond just the setting. Portman's reflection in the subway window, on the glass in the bar as Kunis drugs the drink, the mirrors becoming warped and betraying her, and then ultimately literally killing her. I'm really trying to pinpoint my feelings on what Aronofsky was going for with all of these things, and I really want a second viewing to process it.