White Swan/Black Swan

As a former aspiring ballerina myself, I was very excited to learn that there was a new Natalie Portman film coming out focusing on the story of Swan Lake.  I finally got a chance to see it last weekend and was a bit thrown off with what the film was actually about.  Verging on the Halloween-y, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) was a painful watch--how can you see the beauty when you're watching the whole film from between your fingers?  Despite this, the film has still managed to win the praise of a few critics.

David Denby called the film a "luridly beautiful farrago" in The New Yorker.  According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, a "farrago" is "a confused mixture," which I would agree with as being an accurate description of a film that was trying to be too many things (psychological thriller, cerebral, dance film, sexy) when it really boiled down to something just plain disturbing.  Denby also ties the film to Freudian theory: "'Black Swan' turns Freud's uncanny into shtick; the sinister elements are overloaded and overdetermined."  It's true that there seems to be an excessive amount of doubles until they overlap and lose their meaning.  Denby describes Aronofsky's work as "aestheticizing insanity" as seen in the use of four colors: white, black, pink, and red.

In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis enjoys the self torture aspect.  Dargis writes that part of the film's gratification can be found in the "giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation cinema."  As Dargis points out, the main character, Nina, "doesn't just pirouette prettily, she also cracks her damaged toes (the sound design picking up ever crackle and crunch) and sticks her fingers down her throat to vomit up her food."  Not a very pretty sight.  Dargis, however, argues that Aronofsky manages to "transcend" the clichés that Denby isolates.  Dargis also calls attention to the use of the hand-held camera that allows for more "intimacy."

On Ain't It Cool News, Steve "Capone" Prokopy calls Black Swan the "finest work of [Natalie Portman's] career."  Capone writes, "in a complex and bizarre way, we are rooting for Nina to complete her transformation, even if it means her losing her mind or her life."

Perhaps I'm alone here, but in my opinion Black Swan certainly is no Red Shoes (1948).

Rotten Tomatometer Ratings:
All Critics Avg. Rating: 8.2/10, 88% liked it, as of 12/19/10
Audience Avg. Rating: 4.3/5, 91% liked it, as of 12/19/10