Annie Reviews: Black Swan (2011)
I wanted so much to be blown away by Black Swan, partly because I wanted the justification for the purchase of one of the beautifully rendered 1920s style posters that have been produced to commemorate the release of this much Oscar-buzzed film. I also wanted to love it because so many other people had – friends, family, respected critics. I just couldn’t get over the sheer melodrama of the piece, however, or the overbearingly clunky use of cliché and stereotype, which made it difficult for me to swallow as a serious film, and deserving of all its hype and buzz.
I found the protagonist Nina, played by Golden Globe winner, and hotly tipped for Oscars glory Natalie Portman, cloying in her innocence and childishness. She was hard to age as a character, but I would hazard a guess at her being meant to be around the mid-twenties point, and yet she sleeps in a Disneyfied haven of teddy bears and butterfly wallpaper. It is not unusual these days to find children in their twenties still living at home, but the idea that she wouldn’t have redecorated in a decade was frankly more than a little hard to believe. I understand that all this – her insistence in wearing only pale pink and pastel colours, her teddy bears, her soft voice and tendency to tears – were used to emphasise the transformation into the black swan, and the casting off of her childish shackles in order to embrace her new wilder, more adult side. It fell short of convincing me, however, because it was so extreme, and in some ways I was more convinced by the descent into madness than by Nina’s original state as the innocent ingénue.
The film is of course, sublime in its ridiculousness. And perhaps this is the point, but I just couldn’t at any point in my viewing fully embrace Nina as a believable character, and therefore, couldn’t sympathise with her. And it wasn’t just Nina who was an almost farcical exaggeration of a stereotype. Her foil Lily (Mila Kunis) is also reduced to type as the wilder, free-spirited, sexually dynamic San Franciscan to Nina’s repressed, childlike, Upper West Side Wasp. Vincent Cassel is also somewhat wasted in his talent as the sexually manipulative director Thomas; a man who seems to think it his artistic right to sleep with all of his principal dancers, in order to bring out their darker, more seductive side. Despite finding myself hating Thomas for his presumption and tendency towards manipulation, he is also funny and wry, and he has a point about Nina; she
is weak and ineffectual, and maybe that’s why I found her so grating, because she represents a part of us that we have to leave behind at a certain point in life, lest we flounder in our insecurities, dependencies and butterfly bedecked bedrooms.
The problem with Black Swan is that it tries too hard to make its point, and in doing so left me feeling alienated from all the characters, because they only represent parts of us, and not one of them is representative of the fine balancing act it takes to be a well-rounded human being. They are caricatures of men and women in a melodrama, rather than fully formed characters in a film. In creating a melodrama, I can’t help but feel that Aronofsky has fallen short of the film he could have made, because, for me at least, a psychological thriller needs to have believable characters at the centre of it in order to create a convincing portrayal of the psychoses that can affect us all.
None of this is to say that Black Swan isn’t enjoyable, however, because it is; it just isn’t quite the film I wish it had been.
Rated: A disappointing but not terrible 3/5
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