2. 'Black Swan'
If torture, perfectionism, masochism and emaciated, ethereal sprites
pirouetting themselves into delicate music-box coffins can become an exalted,
grandiloquent mixture of horror and beauty, then "Black Swan" is a glorious
rhapsody. It's a movie in which women ... more suffer (and suffer) not only for their
art, but for their gender, and all the proud yet vulnerable complexities that
frequently come with it. At the center of this ecstatic agony is Natalie Portman's Nina, a New York ballerina
chosen to play the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," a role that is
indeed an honor, but also a real-life Method-acting nightmare. Extracting every
bit of self-mutilating, starving, smothered-mother psychodrama this young
woman's been living with all her life, Nina's world turns into a kind of
dementia that Roman Polanski, David Cronenberg, Jacqueline Susann and, for that
matter, William Castle, would cook up: Black Swan Sardonicus. But this is a
Darren Aronofsky movie -- "The Wrestler" goes "Red Shoes" -- and if one finds
it hyperbolic, they should: grandiosity bleeding into a dingy subway car.
And yet, even pitched at frenzied Grand Guignol, the movie remains both
allegorical and heartbreakingly personal. As Nina unravels, we are right there
with her, observing and, thanks to Portman's powerful performance, feeling her
real and imagined afflictions -- scratching, obsessive nail clipping, impossibly
bent toes, and then doppelgangers, dizzying paranoia and phantasmagoria galore.
But she is a human being after all, even if she can't view herself as one, and
her dedication is touching. Many yearn to emerge the swan, but as Leda can
attest, those birds can be monstrous. -- Kim Morgan
(Fox Searchlight Pictures)
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