Nightmare on Swan Lake

Pity Nina Sayers, the control-obsessed ballet dancer played by Natalie Portman in Black Swan: she wears a tortured expression through much of Darren Aronofsky’s film, and you can see why. She dreams of getting the lead part in Swan Lake for a big New York ballet production, yet her constant hallucinations and inner turmoil are preventing her from “letting go” and fully embracing the Black Swan half of her dual role.

Or perhaps visions of tearing one’s fingernails out at the root or seeing evilly-smiling Doppelgangers lurking in dark ballet studios is simply par for the course for New York’s ballet dancers. It is a tough town, after all.

Aronofsky’s psychological thriller fits neatly alongside his previous examinations of math driving one bonkers (Pi), drugs driving one bonkers (Requiem for a Dream), and professional wrestling driving one bonkers (The Wrestler). It has most in common, tone-wise, with Requiem, with its unrelenting focus on obsessive behavior and the damage it can bring. But it’s a companion piece, of sorts, with the Mickey Rourke comeback vehicle The Wrestler, which featured a different sort of tortured artist, the kind who staples his wounds together between bouts in the ring. Both Rourke and Portman give gut-wrenching performances, showing that Aronofsky is in touch with the perils of perfecting art.

But there’s something else going on here. Aronofsky made a risky, if brave, decision to go waaay over the top. Whereas Powell and Pressburger gave us the luridly brilliant The Red Shoes, another portrait of the Faustian bargain of pursuing excellence in art, Aronofsky gives us a straight-out horror movie. If Black Swan had wanted to go the stately, arthouse film route, it might have cut back on the shock moments and gore tactics. But then it wouldn’t be quite so much fun.

AFrenemies: Nina (Portman) chows down with fellow ballet dancer Lily (Mila Kunis).

Nina is a prim, repressed, but dedicated dancer who aches for a big break. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) is an overbearing, one-dimensional monolith cut from the same cloth as Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest and Piper Laurie in Carrie. When ballet director Vincent Cassel starts auditions for a new production of Swan Lake, he has one eye on Nina, and another on Lily (Mila Kunis), the kind of sly newcomer who wouldn’t think twice about sleeping with the director or spiking a friend’s drink with Ecstasy. A true frenemy, in other words.

Except we’re never really sure whether such things actually occur, or if they transpire only inside Nina’s mind. In the disturbing spirit of Gaslight and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Aronofsky is interested in placing us squarely inside Nina’s point of view, where things are never crystal clear.

But as hallucinations go, these are pretty vivid, creepy and entertaining. Those in the market for a bit of girl-on-girl action will not be disappointed by Black Swan; those who like to see swan feathers sprouting from beneath human skin, or eyes turn scarily red, will enjoy the plentiful booga-booga moments; and those who have ever wondered what it would look like if a roomful of creepy portrait paintings started moving their mouths in unison will find the answer here.

Most creepy, perhaps, is the re-appearance of Winona Ryder, Hollywood’s “It” girl of the early ‘90s, who plays an aging, burned-out ballet dancer (Beth) who is eased out of the company by Cassel. Her few outbursts onscreen are priceless, reminding us both of the brattiness of her prime years and her dubious real-life reputation since being replaced in Hollywood by a posse of younger, more stable talents, among them Angelina Jolie and, well, Natalie Portman. (There is a scene where Nina pockets some of Beth’s/Ryder’s makeup items from her dressing room, a scene that caused my wife to smirk, recalling Ryder’s own shoplifting record. The scene also echoes Anne Baxter taking over Bette Davis’ dressing room in All About Eve.)

It’s easy to see what cinematic echoes Aronofsky was trying to stir up here: there’s the mental deterioration of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion and Polanski himself in The Tenant, especially during the scenes inside Nina’s claustrophobic Manhattan apartment; there’s the kind of obsession with perfection (overseen by a possibly evil Svengali director) that drove The Red Shoes; and there’s an almost David Cronenberg feel to the way Nina desecrates her own flesh, reminding us of horror classics like Videodrome, The Fly and the auto-erotic thriller Crash. Again, if Aronofsky was simply a pompous arthouse director, he would have toned down the shock corridor bits and made a boring, pompous arthouse movie. And no one would have cared.

Instead, getting under the skin is what he’s all about here, and judging by the way many dancers — ballet and otherwise — have reacted viscerally to the film, one has to consider that maybe suffering for art is not as uncommon as it seems. Nina routinely flexes her toes uncomfortably to stand en pointe; she gnaws her cuticles bloody; and she apparently has some weird rash (or is it self-flagellation?) that flares up across her back during rehearsals.

Portman, who reportedly shed 25 pounds from her already-skinny frame to do the role, seems a shoe-in (pun intended) for the Best Actress Oscar. With her porcelain features, she is perfectly suited to play the White Swan, the innocent ballet dancer in Swan Lake; but it’s the scary bits where we see the Black Swan emerge — in fleeting Doppelganger glimpses at first, but increasingly in confrontational close-ups — where Portman shows a bit more range. Her character is described as “frigid,” afraid to “lose control” to the passion of dance. As a parable of Apollonian versus Dionysian impulses, Black Swan doesn’t break any new ground; it just drags us along on a mad journey through Nina’s psyche. And that’s where all the action is.

In the end, Nina makes a determined, self-destructive leap into her art that is similar to the one Mickey Rourke makes in The Wrestler, showing the two films are actually opposite sides of the same coin, and that perhaps high art and low — both on full, masterful display in Aronofsky’s film — are not so far apart after all.