Black Swan
Lately I got this urge to see the films so prominent at this year’s Oscar. How the heck did they manage to overtake the brilliance of “Inception” and “The Social Network”, I wonder?
In the case of “Black Swan”, it is fairly easy: Certainly there is no better female performance when most of the movies are predominantly male. You can’t really count that weird girl who played Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend or little Ellen Page in Inception after all. When it comes to the other nominated movies, I have barely seen any of them so I don’t know. But at any rate, Natalie Portman was sure to get this Oscar, and even though I really like her acting, I found it to be mostly boring in “Black Swan”. It’s almost like she is doing nothing new – she seems to have done all of this before already, and her acting genius ever since “Leon” did not actually improve all that much. On the bright side it means that she was quite great to begin with, on the other side she probably spent too much time being glamorous and worrying about Israel.
Enough ranting onto the film itself: It was indeed as ‘female’ as I have expected it. The most interesting character was actually Lily who you never knew if you should consider her an actual threat or if she was just the naughty girl from next door.
One thing I noticed was that I didn’t find the main character to be all that crazy after all. She kept having hallucinations but she never became ‘evil’ until very shortly before the end, when she was finally able to do her black swan right. In that respect, all the promotion with the black make-up is rather misleading – she remains quite true to herself, she remains the tight-assed, nervous, overly serious girl right up to the end. She just became crazy, but then again, who would not become crazy in such a situation?
My personal biggest irk with the film is probably my own perception of “Swan Lake”. Over the years, I have seen it in many productions; in fact, this ballet, along with “Sleeping Beauty”, is perhaps the only product of theatre/ballet/opera that I have seen this often (i.e. more than twice and throughout my entire life). Just like certain movies which I have rewatched several times over the years, such as “Amelie” or “The Dreamers”, my impression of “Swan Lake” has evolved over the years and I am looking back at fond memories associated with it. As a little girl, I believed that the white swan was absolutely good and the black swan was absolutely evil, later on I even tended to interpret the black swan as this character who uses her sexuality to “steal away” the guy, making her a rather generic chick flick character. Even though this might be generic, I think that hits the core of Swan Lake and so I don’t quite believe in this “your black swan has to seduce the audience”. Ballet is charming but not that overtly sexual (truth to be told, the most dignified and beautiful ballet dancers look like they have not eaten for 20 years – is that really sexy?) and unless a production has a very modern, screwed up choreography it will not seduce an audience, nor will it try to. It’s much more subtle than that, and I felt like there was a misunderstanding of ballet altogether here.
Speaking of sex appeal, I was very amused at how quickly hands move towards the main character’s vagina without ever having any sex. It reminded me very much of smutty manga for older girls.
All in all, I am changing my impression on Aronofsky from “absolutely unwatchable” to “interesting”, and “Black Swan” was at least interesting and very, very entertaining. I guess now I have to watch “The Wrestler”.