Black Swan Oscar Buzz

Natalie Portman costumed as Nina Sayers

The New York Times
December 30, 2010

Natalie Portman Embraces Monster and Victim
By A. O. SCOTT

THE subject of “Black Swan” — a leading candidate for the most misunderstood film of 2010 — is the relationship, in art, between technique and emotion. Ballet, the specific art form in question, is shown to require endless practice and grueling physical discipline. Bodies, in particular the bodies of young women, are stretched and twisted into unnatural postures, and the cost of the fleeting, breathtaking grace they attain is reckoned in close-ups of battered, bloody feet and tendons pulled almost to the snapping point. The toe shoes that are among the principal tools of this torment also seem to be surrogates and scapegoats; they are scraped, mutilated and disfigured by the dancers in a symbolic re-enactment of the violence they perform upon themselves in their ruthless pursuit of perfection.

Is “Black Swan” a realistic portrayal of life in a ballet company? Probably not. Is it an overheated, wildly melodramatic rendering of an artist’s struggle? Without a doubt. And to scold the director, Darren Aronofsky, for what he doesn’t get about dancers or how he looks at women is almost deliberately to miss the point. This is, at bottom, a horror movie. It gathers psychological implications from its chosen milieu and makes them literal, giving flesh to wild metaphors of female sexuality and aesthetic risk.

“Black Swan” is no more about the behavior of ballerinas than its central pretext, “Swan Lake,” is about the habits of birds. It is, rather, an inky, unhinged fairy tale, a swirl of intuitions and sensations visited upon and realized through the body of its star, Natalie Portman.

Ms. Portman appears in nearly every frame of the movie, sometimes more than once. She is reflected in the mirrors that line the walls of the practice salles, in the windows of subway trains passing through dark tunnels, and in the faces of the mysterious doubles — strangers on the street and rivals in the company — that her character, Nina Sayers, mistakes for herself. Nina, who lives with her Freudian nightmare of a mother in a spooky Upper West Side apartment, is a hard-working dancer cast as the lead in a new, revisionist production of “Swan Lake.”

Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the artistic director who serves equally as handsome prince and evil sorcerer in Nina’s increasingly fevered imagination, pushes her to incarnate, within a single performance, both an ideal of inviolate femininity and its dark mirror image. His conception of the swan figure may not be subtle, and it certainly flirts with an old misogynist dualism — the pristine virgin versus the witchy seductress — but it provides the film, and Ms. Portman, with a dramatically potent idea. The white swan and the black represent, above all, the Apollonian and Dionysian poles of art, one restrained and rational, the other unruly, passionate and dangerous.

Thomas pushes Nina, whose delicacy and precision is never in doubt, to “let go,” and her contradictory effort to obey him — to perfect her performance by allowing spontaneity and imperfection into it — is what makes her and undoes her. The forced integration of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses leads to the disintegration of her personality, a literal splitting into two Ninas that takes place in full view of the camera and also entirely, it seems, within the character’s mind.

All of this might be preposterously over the top were it not for Ms. Portman, who not only turns an abstraction into flesh and blood but also takes us inside Nina’s head and under her skin. Much has been made of the punishing regimen that Ms. Portman undertook to prepare for the role, and the results are both ravishing and frightening. When she is not dancing, and sometimes when she is, Nina’s slender, delicate frame can look starved and skeletal, her hollow cheeks and large eyes the features of a death’s head rather than a china doll. And she seems, with her mother and with Thomas, more like a terrified child than an accomplished professional with the skills of an athlete. She is, to some extent, the creature of these two dominating figures, with very little personality of her own and almost no ability to articulate her own desires or feelings other than by trembling, perpetually, on the verge of tears.

In keeping with the logic of “Swan Lake” her liberation — her realization of a self freed from the constraints of other people — takes the form of self-destruction, and it is in mapping this paradoxical process that Ms. Portman conducts her own brilliant counterpoint of instinct and technique. Mr. Aronofsky certainly creates a mood of paranoia and incipient madness, embellishing the traditional horror-movie idiom of tracking shots and shock cuts with eerie sound effects and digital tricks. Ms. Portman is dabbed with stage blood and digital goose flesh, stalked and spied on by the camera, wrapped in the jumped-up Tchaikovskian wail of Clint Mansell’s score.

But in the end it all comes down to the actress, who seems, before our eyes, to be participating in the invention of a new kind of screen performance. In its various iterations, the Method has been about using voice and gesture to express a character’s deep psychological truth. Ms. Portman, like other young actors working with filmmakers who emphasize the visceral and the immediate, seems almost to reverse this process. Nina’s psychological state is evidently part of the artifice of “Black Swan,” but her body, subject to unimaginable (and sometimes unreal) mutations and mutilations, is the film’s ground zero of authenticity.

The pivotal scene is a simple one: Nina, alone in the rehearsal studio, looks at her multiplying mirror images and loses control of them. What follows is a crescendo of madness leading up to her opening night triumph, during all of which it becomes increasingly difficult for the audience — or for Nina — to find the boundary between reality and fantasy. And it is a boundary that Ms. Portman succeeds in erasing by hurling herself, with reckless conviction, into Nina’s world and becoming both the monster and the victim in this horror movie.

Which is another way of saying that she is both the black swan and the white, both the perfectly controlled performer and the pure creature of instinct. We can assure ourselves that Nina does not really turn into a bird. We also know, being sane and disciplined moviegoers, that Ms. Portman — pregnant and engaged (to the movie’s choreographer) and happy in the wake of her latest professional triumph — is not Nina Sayers. But we also know, on the irrefutable evidence of our own eyes, and the prickly sensation of our skin, that she is.

Personal comment: With all the work Natalie Portman put into the role it would be wonderful if she was able to win an Oscar! Box office: Domestic Total as of Jan. 2, 2011: $47,370,000 (Estimate) Production budget, $13,000,000.

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!