Black Swan: All Smoke and Mirrors?

Black Swan advertises itself as a psycho-sexual thriller, when it could just as easily be labeled a parable. The psycho sexual part--while drawing most of the male audience members at the screening I attended last night--was also the most disappointing.

The plot of Black Swan is laid out early on during a speech that the dance director, Thomas, gives his ballerinas in practice. Summarizing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, he foreshadows that this will be the story of a girl turned into a white swan queen who must find love to break the spell. When her double, the black swan, seduces the prince instead, the swan queen leaps to her death.

The camera's early, constant focus on Nina Salyers (Natalie Portman) introduces her as the swan queen. Tomas awards her the part of the swan queen after she shows him a dark side by biting him. But he still admonishes her to let loose, to tap into her dark side more vigorously. How is she going to do this? Can she make this transformation while remaining herself, the film seems to ask. Darren Aronofsky's camera follows Nina closely throughout Black Swan. He produces a shaky hand held effect focusing on the back of Portman's head wherever she goes. While this effect signals that everything we see is through Nina's eyes, our position as audience members still gives us the distance to interpret Nina's experiences.

So each time that Nina sees something mysterious--the words "Whore" strewn on the bathroom mirror, or a darker doppelganger who appears at inopportune moments--we are presented with a choice. Are these sightings for real or just figments of Nina's imagination? While the movie initially seems to suggest that there might be a scientific, Portman's strained expression and the audience's knowledge of schizophrenia also lead us to believe that Portman is simply seeing things that don't exist and is otherwise paranoid. Soon after Nina gets her role, an older dancer who has just been foisted out of the company, Beth (WInona Ryder), warns her that an up and coming dancer will soon be after her role. Sure enough, Nina starts to envision her double everywhere in addition to her competitor Lily (Mila Kunis) seducing the Thomas. We can only draw the conclusion that Nina was strongly influenced by Beth's words.

The problem, of course, is that if we write off Nina as a crazy person so early on, we can no longer buy into her struggle to tap into her dark side. Nina is already far gone. There's only the matter of watching her steep and quick decline. In contrast to movies about mental decline such as A Beautiful Mind, the well being of no one seems to be at stake here. We haven't seen Nina, while admirable in her discipline, is precisely as cold as Thomas says she is. Portman wears a furrowed brow in nearly every scene and rarely cracks a smile. Her peeling cuticles only exemplify her uptight demeanor.

Black Swan is still a memorable movie, if only for Aronofsky's direction. He gives us a terrifyingly physical glimpse into the body of a ballet dancer. We see Nina's cracked toenails, skin rashes and emaciated body.

Unfortunately, these shots only emphasize Nina's frigidity. With little character development at stake, Black Swan unfolds as a retelling of Swan Lake and little more.