Once You Go Black

"The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness." - Mick Jagger, Performance

Everybody's Lucifer had it right. The swivel-hipped satyr could as easily been giving stage notes to Nina Sayers, Natalie Portman's bedeviled ballerina, as she struggles to embrace the psyche-splintering demands of her performance in Swan Lake—which includes a dual role as the Black Swan, the Jungian alter-ego of the title figure, and the thematic engine of Darren Aronofsky's film of the same name. The dynamics were a bit different in Performance, the 1968 Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film in which Jagger's hermetic rock god Turner plays mind games with a mob enforcer (James Fox) on the run, who has tumbled into his Dionysian lair. There, sexy druggy things ensue, before someone dies and Turner may or may not have become a doppelgangster.

Seeing as Performance hit screens in 1970, when audiences were as likely to be stoned or munching blotter acid as they were popcorn, its hallucinatory style—synonymous with Roeg—is practically inchoate compared to Aronofsky's carefully attenuated orchestration of Nina's mental meltdown in Black Swan. That's one of the new film's strengths, even as he taps into the cinema of insanity, doubles, shattered mirrors, bent psychologies, and edgy sexuality that includes films like Persona and Mulholland Dr., not to mention freaked-out classics of mental disintegration like Repulsion, and the thriller continuum that runs from Hitchcock to Cronenberg. Aronofsky keeps an impressively tight focus on the core of his story before it gradually spins toward a tripped-out climax that rates as the most exhilarating screen moment of the year.

It begins as backstage drama, almost a documentary in its matter-of-factness. The close-ups of Portman going through her preparatory ritual, cracking toes, pulling off bloody toenails, bolstering them with tape, the unyielding demands of the arduous rehearsals, the insecure glances and catty asides of the other dancers, the daily bulimic purging … it's all as process-driven as The Wrestler, the film's macho, low-brow flipside, which shares an obsession with physical suffering, persona management, and a devotion to an art form so complete it erases the lines between death and glory. Aronofsky's use of a similar, Dardennes-style camera angle—often shooting handheld close-ups from behind Portman's head—isn't the only obvious thing, but there are subtler resonances as well. Just as Mickey Rourke's doomed Randy "The Ram" Robinson encounters an old ringmate whose bladder now drains into a bag as he sits in a wheelchair, Portman's Nina gets a terrifying glimpse of a possible future when she visits Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder, barely recognizable)—the ballerina she has replaced in Swan Lake—in the hospital. Heartbroken after being dumped from the role, and the physical affections of the Balanchine-like company director played by Vincent Cassel, she wanders into Manhattan traffic and gets smashed to bits.

It's not Nina's body that comes apart, even though the physical demands that the role made on Portman (and co-star Mila Kunis) saw her drop weight and strengthen sinews so that her entire corporeal presence changed dramatically—if, indeed, the camera makes a pleasurable fetish of detailing that transformation in its every facet. No, the fragmentation happens on the inside. The film stacks the deck against Nina, whose almost cyborgian drive for perfection is reinforced by the year's creepiest movie mom: Barbara Hershey's invasive stage mom as prison guard, a former dancer who abandoned the ballet to raise her child. Therese DePrez's wickedly conceptualized design pulls fascinating stuff out of the Hershey character's back story, having her be an amateur artist obsessed with painting canvases with big-eyed faces that suggest Margaret Keane on crack rock, but all meant to be childhood portraits of Nina. Likewise, Nina's bedroom (and/or cell) is a fairytale domain of pinkest pink, presided over by a menagerie of stuffed animal dolls that, as everything begins to go to shit, become as disturbing as that rotting rabbit carcass in Catherine Deneuve's refrigerator in Repulsion. Trapped in this pre-pubescent girly world, the classically frigid, virginal Nina finds her quest for perfection on a collision track with her role's command to be imperfect: to be the sinister Black Swan, driven by aggressive and sexual instincts whose cultivation Nina’s rival, Kunis's pill-popping, crotch-rubbing, cigarette-smoking Lily appears all too delighted to assist in.

This promiscuous near-twin and maybe-lover could be a double, an object of desire, a frenemy, or—more often than not—a fantasy projection. As Nina's spiral begins, she's haunted by an imagined Black Swan even as her compulsive scratching/self-mutilation appears to be encouraging black wings to sprout from her shoulder blades. Whirling up into dizzying absurdity as Nina explodes out of herself, the film's sense of the real becomes daringly lost within the character's own subjective vision, a psychosexual hall of mirrors in which she makes it, makes it all the way.

Posted by ahillis at December 3, 2010 12:39 PM