It turns out that ballet isn’t so different from professional wrestling: both are choreographed, both take enormous physical tolls and both can make you a little crazy — the former just has much smaller performers and far better music. It’s odd to think of Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Black Swan, a backstage thriller about professional ballet, as a companion piece to his last film, The Wrestler, a backstage melodrama about professional wrestling, with Natalie Portman playing a diminutive version of Mickey Rourke, only in less gaudy tights. But it’s not entirely inaccurate.
Okay, so maybe there isn’t a one-to-one relationship, but Black Swan does carry on a number of visual signatures from The Wrestler: the hand-held, grainy 16mm camera work, the frequent employment of the behind-the-head walking shot (cribbed from Belgium’s Dardenne brothers) in tracking the movements of its protagonist as well as the voyeuristic look at the parts of the performance one never sees: the aches, pains, and injuries that are a constant backstage. And there are thematic similarities, in one individual’s obsession with achievement through performance. But for Natalie Portman’s Nina, just plucked from the rank and file of the ballet company to dance the lead role of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, it’s her mind that’s betraying her more than her body.
Aronofsky seeks to create a kind of visual representation of stage fright and performance anxiety, the worst inclinations of a heavily stressed unconscious made (bloody) flesh and bone. Nina is dealing with stress from all sides. There’s her intense, controlling mother (Barbara Hershey, creating one of the most fearsome stage mothers ever to darken a movie screen), who gave up her own career as a dancer to raise Nina and is sure never to let her forget about it. The ballet’s artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a fairly sleazy, womanizing Frenchman who relishes putting Nina in uncomfortable sexual situations, both to unlock the seductive “Black Swan” half of her performance and, presumably, for his own gratification. And then there’s Lily (Mila Kunis), a party-girl dancer just arrived from San Francisco, who may just be gunning for Nina’s spot at the top and makes up for her technical deficiencies with exactly the kind of raw sensuality that Nina lacks in her own performances.
