Mirrors play a key role in Black Swan, literally reflecting Nina's descent into insanity.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Mark Heyman (screenplay), Andres Heinz (screenplay)
Stars: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel
When my brother went to see this film he said there was an older couple sat behind him who had clearly gone to see Black Swan in the expectation that it was a modern re-imagining of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. They left pretty soon into the film after the sex, madness and blood permeated the screen.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a New York ballerina whose whole life has been conditioned to dance by her controlling, spiteful mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) herself a former ballerina who is living vicariously through her daughter. Ballet director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) tentatively casts Nina in her dream role of Swan Lake’s swan queen after initially thinking she could not cope with the duality of the part; while there is no doubt she would make the best innocent, beautiful white swan, the role also requires Nina to play the seductive, impulsive black swan. In struggling to come to terms with the previously unlocked dark side to her character, Nina undergoes a physical and mental transformation with the help of Leroy and her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) that leads her into madness.
Darren Aronofsky films are nothing if not intense, but the overbearing sense of pressure and claustrophobia he achieves in Black Swan is perfect for the film. As Nina becomes consumed by her role, everything you see and hear is geared to make you feel uncomfortable, from scenes of her surreal, gruesome physical transformation to disorientating fluctuations in the music volume. In one scene that particularly highlights Aronofsky’s approach, Nina is making out with a guy she has just met in a club when halfway through she realises what she’s doing and leaves via a labyrinthine structure of murky corridors. The whole scene is shot in a single continuous take, which, while doubtlessly difficult to capture, brilliantly creates a sense of intensity and inescapable claustrophobia. This film is littered with interesting angles, focuses and changes in tempo, all wonderfully crafted to compliment the madness on screen.
Attentive viewers will also notice that there is a mirror or a reflective surface in nearly every scene until the end of the film, literally reflecting Nina’s physical change and enabling us to experience her distress at her breakdown first-hand.
But Aronofsky doesn’t stop with manipulating the visuals as he uses both the senses at his disposal to create his vision – hearing is as important as seeing in Black Swan. After seeing this film one of my friends said they enjoyed it, but they thought something was wrong with the cinema because the sound fluctuated so violently. This is, of course, is completely intentional. The film switches without hesitation between normal dialogue and the tinnitus-inducingly loud bars of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake theme to create a sense of disorientation and discomfort that mirrors Nina’s own confusion.
This is complimented by the film’s soundtrack, composed by Clint Mansell, which is a composite of music from Swan Lake but played backwards and distorted. This again reflects Nina’s mental process. Here is a girl whose whole life has been consumed by her desire to play the swan queen. She knows every bar of the Swan Lake theme, it is played in her home, in the music boxes in her bedroom and is even her ringtone; so when she starts to break down that is all she can hear, spinning around in her head, distorted and out of sorts, in harmony with her fragile mind. It may not make for particularly pleasant viewing, like most of the film, but if that’s what you’re after, go to a Richard Curtis film.
It is an easy thing to say, but it also should be noted that this is by far the best thing Natalie Portman has ever done on screen. She manages to be sexy while still capturing a childlike innocence that is vital for the role (in many ways this film is about Nina becoming a woman) and she wonderfully portrays Nina’s descent into madness with an apprehension of a woman still trying to hold on to her last remnants of sanity. The role of Nina in this film is complex enough to always make it an Oscar contender, but it still had to be acted right and Portman strikes a brilliant balance.
Mila Kunis was also good in her first serious role, although I doubt she will ever have a problem playing dark and seductive, and Vicent Cassel was, as ever, intimidatingly masculine. Barbara Hershey did a wonderful job playing Nina’s overbearing, cruel mother.
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