Black Swan an appreciation

Natalie Portman costumed as Odile in the film Black Swan

The New York Times
HOLIDAY MOVIES
October 30, 2010
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

A Dark Transformation to Strains of ‘Swan Lake’

“WHEN I started thinking about ‘Swan Lake,’ ” said Darren Aronofsky, whose new film, “Black Swan,” is about a young dancer wrestling with the demanding lead role in that ballet, “a dancer, I think Julie Kent, said to me that the story is really about a girl who gets caught by an evil magician who turns her into a swan during the day and a half-swan, half-human at night. It popped into my head, ‘Oh, a were-swan.’ And I realized I was making a werewolf movie.”

It seems not to have occurred to him, even at that moment of enlightenment, that good werewolf movies are nearly as rare as good ballet films, but the thought probably wouldn’t have daunted him much. “I mean, that was probably one of the major things that attracted me to the story,” he said, “the idea of putting Natalie Portman through this physical transformation. That’s what the fairy tale is about.”

Physical transformation is, after all, what ballet is about too: the stretching and shaping and molding of a body into a form that makes impossible movements possible, and allows a creature of flesh and blood to transcend the limitations of the merely human and take flight (at least metaphorically) into the region of the sublime. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

The reality, as Ms. Portman discovered in training for her role in “Black Swan” (opening Dec. 3), can be as harrowing as a horror movie. “I’d studied ballet,” she said recently by phone, “from the age of 4 to about 13, at the American Dance Theater Workshop on Long Island, which is associated with the Eglevsky Ballet, and from the time I became an actress I think I always wanted to do a ballet film.”

Mr. Aronofsky, whose sister had also been a serious ballet student in her youth, approached Ms. Portman with the idea for the film while she was still in college, but when, years later, the time finally came to make the movie, she said, “I quickly realized that I wasn’t as advanced as I thought I was.”

Before shooting began, she trained for months with the former New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers. She also “really immersed myself in ballet for a whole year,” she said, reading autobiographies of dancers (especially from the New York City Ballet) and discovering in them “almost a religious quality, not only in the deification of Balanchine, but also in all this sort of ritualistic, devotional behavior dancers practice — the repetitive barre work every day, breaking in the toe shoes and sewing the ribbons on and so forth.”

Nina, the young dancer Ms. Portman plays, lives a virtually monastic life, sharing a cramped Manhattan apartment with her overbearing mother (played by Barbara Hershey) and venturing forth only for company classes and rehearsals. And this, as Ms. Portman told it, was her existence too during the making of “Black Swan.”

“Basically,” she said, “I didn’t do anything except work. There was no, like, meeting up with friends for dinner or going to the movies. We’d do 16-hour days, then I’d go home and work out, because I had to stay in shape, and I’d prepare for the next day’s scenes and then get maybe five hours of sleep. It was really, really extreme.”

Her character, struggling to master the good swan, bad swan dynamic of the ballet’s central role and enduring the emotional manipulations of the company’s Balanchine-like artistic director (played by Vincent Cassel), gradually goes mad — which, in the strange, hermetic little horror-movie world of “Black Swan,” isn’t necessarily a detriment to her performance.

“I’m always very interested in performance,” said Mr. Aronofsky, 41, “and this story is about that, which gives it, I think, a clear connection to ‘The Wrestler,’ ” his 2008 film with Mickey Rourke. “When I finished at the American Film Institute, in my early 20s, I made a list of movies I wanted to make someday, and ‘The Wrestler’ was at the top, and a ballet film may have been the second.”

What attracted him to ballet as a movie subject is “an intensity in it that is so over the top, so overwrought, so melodramatic,” he said. “And the stories of ballets like ‘Swan Lake’ are often based on fairy tales, and they can be really Gothic and really tragic.”

He’s onto something there. Because ballet is a profoundly inefficient narrative medium, the stories have to be fairly simple and stark, as they are in fairy tales. And of course transformation into something that is not quite human (like the “were-swan” here) or even fully inhuman (like the automaton in “Coppelia”) is both inherently scary and, in this peculiar art, weirdly thrilling. The ability to play a seductive mechanical doll or a big beautiful bird is a measure of a ballerina’s virtuosity.

Poor ambitious Nina’s insanity is, in a way, just an occupational hazard: ballet dancers train for years, changing their bodies utterly, so they can get up on a stage and make us believe that they are someone, or something, they’re not. A certain over-the-top-ness is built right in. So Nina’s dancing gets better as she becomes crazier, growing more and more estranged from herself.

“I’d always been interested in doing something with Dostoyevsky’s ‘Double,’ ” Mr. Aronofsky said, “and when I saw ‘Swan Lake’ for the first time, I was blown away that it was one dancer dancing both roles.”

At a certain point the story of “Swan Lake” grafted itself onto a script called “The Understudy,” by Andres Heinz, which was, Mr. Aronofsky said, “set in the Off Broadway theater world and was kind of a combination of ‘The Double’ and ‘All About Eve,’ with a little bit of Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ in there too.”

After a couple of more writers — first John McLaughlin, then Mark Heyman — and 20 or 30 drafts, Mr. Aronofsky was satisfied that he had a movie he could make, and one that, despite its relatively un-commercial subject matter, audiences might want to see.

“I thought,” he said, “that there hadn’t been many interesting movies about ballet, except for Michael Powell’s ‘Red Shoes.’ Ballet is such a unique world, very sexy and very specific, and I think one of the main reasons people go to the movies is to be taken to places they haven’t seen before.”

As it turned out, getting “Black Swan” onto the screen proved to be much tougher than he’d anticipated, “a super-difficult film to make,” he said, in part because that “very specific” world of ballet proved, at first, to be surprisingly unwelcoming.

“Usually when you say you want to make a film about a particular world, doors open up, you get tremendous access,” Mr. Aronofsky said. “But the ballet world wasn’t like that at all. It’s very insular. And dancers never want to do anything that might in any way interrupt their schedule.”

But he eventually engaged the New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied to choreograph “Swan Lake” for the screen, and Mr. Aronofsky was, he said, pleasantly surprised by how much Ms. Portman was able to do. There are, he said, some 300 visual effects in the picture, but he’d expected to have to use many more.

“Natalie was able to give me a lot of stuff that I was unbelievably excited and impressed by,” he said. “Ninety percent of what you see is Natalie, un-retouched.”

There are remarkably few horror movies about the terror and violence of making art, but “Black Swan” is in that tiny company. (So is “The Red Shoes.”) Ballet, as it happens, is an ideal vehicle for a story about the blood, sweat and madness of creation, and it’s kind of appropriate that was itself something of an ordeal.

“It was a very serious set,” Ms. Portman said, “not a funny, silly set at all.” She paused a few seconds, then added, quietly: “It was scary, disciplined and rigorous, and I think, in a way, that fit into the mindset of the characters.”

Even now she sounded a little awed. Mr. Aronofsky’s film is about a feeling all performers are familiar with, the spooky sense, when you’re in full flight, that you’ve crossed over into the dark territory of dream, or fairy tale, somewhere you haven’t seen before. It’s the exhilaration of losing yourself, and the fear of being lost to yourself forever.

Personal Comment: I think this is the most realistic and positive article I’ve seen about Black Swan set in the compulsive world of ballet with its continual training and quest for perfection of line and technique with the human body. With Portman saying of NYCB dancers:

“almost a religious quality, not only in the deification of Balanchine, but also in all this sort of ritualistic, devotional behavior dancers practice — the repetitive barre work every day, breaking in the toe shoes and sewing the ribbons on and so forth.”

Absolutely! And there’s nothing wrong with that!

“Nina’s insanity is, in a way, just an occupational hazard: ballet dancers train for years, changing their bodies utterly, so they can get up on a stage and make us believe that they are someone, or something, they’re not. A certain over-the-top-ness is built right in.”

I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, but he’s right.

“Usually when you say you want to make a film about a particular world, doors open up, you get tremendous access,” Mr. Aronofsky said. “But the ballet world wasn’t like that at all. It’s very insular. And dancers never want to do anything that might in any way interrupt their schedule.”

Schedule conflict is a convenient excuse, but with the exception of cameo roles for established stars ballerina roles in dance films are quite often the kiss of death for a woman wanting a serious career with a national ballet company. There is a feeling that the dancer is taking time from perfecting her art to make a commercial film something a seriously committed dancer wouldn’t do.

“…Ballet is such a unique world, very sexy and very specific, and I think one of the main reasons people go to the movies is to be taken to places they haven’t seen before.”

It will attract a niche market of dance enthusiast and, occult followers but it will need the curious in the general public to be successful. I hope it is a huge success!