“We’re doing Swan Lake,” explains Thomas, the director of a prestigious ballet production, “I know it’s been done before but this will be stripped down.\u00a0 Visceral.”<\/p>\n
Thomas’ description aptly fits both the stylistic approach to his production and to Black Swan<\/em> itself.\u00a0 It tells the story of Nina Sayers, a young, sexually immature ballet dancer who is cast in the starring role of a new Swan Lake production.\u00a0 When she learns of the news that she has been cast in the lead role, she is moved to tears.\u00a0 Ballet is her whole life and also that of her mother’s, who we learn was a dedicated performer but one who never got her big break.\u00a0 This is Nina’s big break.<\/p>\n Nina is a perfectionist and what better craft for a perfectionist than ballet with its gruelling physical demands and hyper-competitive environment where dozens of girls compete for a single coveted spot.<\/p>\n That starring role is made available when Beth, the former Swan Queen and Thomas’ ‘Little Princess’ reaches her use-by date and is unceremoniously dumped from the production.\u00a0 It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that she clung to her spot by offering her body to the predatory Thomas who has a reputation for having affairs with his dancers.\u00a0 Thomas is clearly used to using his authority to mentally dominate his women.\u00a0 He has a tendency to grab the faces of the women he speaks to and his apartment has a gigantic rorschach ink blot on the wall.\u00a0 This is a man who enjoys mindfucking his women as much as he does physically.<\/p>\n Nina however is the virginal White Swan who doesn’t know how to handle Thomas’ bold advances.\u00a0 It is not a lifelong dedication to ballet that has made her this way however.\u00a0 Nina lives at home with her mother Erica who also appears to be her only social outlet outside of ballet.\u00a0 Something feels ‘off’ about their relationship.\u00a0 Erica clearly imposes Nina’s innocence on her.\u00a0 She talks to Nina as if she were a child.\u00a0 She dresses Nina.\u00a0 Her bedroom is decorated as a child’s room with stuffed animals.\u00a0 When Nina masturbates at the instruction of Thomas, her sexual pleasure becomes shattered by a mental image of her mother watching her.\u00a0 Black Swan<\/em> appears to suggest that Nina has been sexually abused by Erica.<\/p>\n In rehearsals for the opening night, Nina is continually chastised by Thomas for her two dimensional performance.\u00a0 She has mastered the tender and elegant routines of the White Swan but the role also calls for her to be convincing as the seductive and devilish Black Swan.\u00a0 How can Nina hope to find her sexual awakening required to be convincing in the role?<\/p>\n Her catalyst is a new dancer on the production named Lily, played by Mila Kunis.\u00a0 Lily is the sexually liberated devil-may-care alter ego that Nina struggles to be.\u00a0 She is effortlessly attractive to men and carries herself with a confidence that Lily cannot hope to match.\u00a0 In ballet, raw talent has gotten Nina so far and yet she is terrified that Lily, who becomes her understudy, will sweep the role away from her with her sexual prowess.\u00a0 Although a rival, Nina can’t help but to be drawn to Lily who embodies qualities that she finds herself lacking.<\/p>\n Gradually Nina becomes increasingly paranoid and unstable.\u00a0 She veers wildly between her three beacons of influence: Her mother Erica, her mentor Thomas and her rival Lily.\u00a0 Aronofsky’s direction uses tight claustrophobic camera work, a jarring orchestral score and flashing hallucinogenic imagery to put the audience on edge, to make them as frazzled as Nina becomes.\u00a0 The line between reality and Nina’s imagination begins to blur.<\/p>\n The final act, when Nina takes centre stage in the Swan Lake performance, offers a heady, melodramatic and intense conclusion.<\/p>\n Black Swan<\/em> is an excellent follow up to Aronofsky’s The Wrestler<\/em> and it clearly shares some thematic links between its two leads who are so driven by their passion that it drives them to self-destruction.\u00a0 In fact, in Aronofsky’s entire catalogue of films, there seems to be an ever present blur between fantasy and reality.\u00a0 I’m not sure Black Swan<\/em> is necessarily his best work but regardless it is a fantastic mindbending film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Swanderful<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[766,274,768,767,87],"class_list":["post-4143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-black-swan","tag-darren-aronofsky","tag-mila-kunis","tag-natalie-portman","tag-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4143"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4417,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4143\/revisions\/4417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}