It is about a ballerina, Nina, played by Natalie Portman, who wants the lead part in a new production of Swan Lake. The film acknowledges that Swan Lake is the most obvious and hackneyed ballet that might have been chosen, but excuses it when the director, Thomas, played by Vincent Cassell, says that he wants this production to be pared back to basics. He believes that Nina is good on control and perfection, which suits the good white swan, but isn't so good at abandonment, which the bad black swan requires. Cassell brings some authority to his part, which is nevertheless underwritten and two-dimensional, embodying the cliches of ballet-masters we may have met before in other films; being tyrannical, severe, cruel, unpredictable and heterosexually lecherous.
Nina doesn't fit in so very well with the other people in the dance company, seeming to be more sheltered and naive than them. It soon becomes clear that the stresses in her life are causing Nina to disconnect from reality: she imagines her body failing in strange ways, peeling improbable amounts of skin from her bleeding fingers, finding scars on her back, even her legs collapse under her weight, she discovers webs forming between her toes, she misconstrues or imagines encounters; and soon we realise that we cannot be sure what we are seeing, whether it is reality or the product of her imagination.
Nina lives with her her mother in a small and modest apartment. As soon as we see the mother the casting, makeup and acting tell us what Nina is in for from her. The mother is straight out of Hitchcock by way of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. She doesn't disappoint, being overbearing, overcaring and over controlling, and that narrative strand plays out with no surprises.
This is not a film that respects the audience; it doesn't trust us to 'get' things without them being rammed down our throat. All the resources of cinema, particularly sound, hand-held close-up, and fast cutting are used to make sure our attention doesn't wander. The problem with this is that my attention did wander. There is a scene when Nina has a night on the town, doing drink, drugs and guys, and we go to a nightclub. It is the noisiest nightclub in a film that I can remember (thinking of Michael Mann's wonderful nightclub scene in Collateral, and the nightclub in Spike Lee's 25th Hour). The strobes strobe and the noise peels paint. Then there is a scene when, before an audience, Nina falls over as she dances. Now, as this was the first night, we can be sure that Thomas is in the wings watching anxiously and, when his lead ballerina falls over, we may be sure he's concerned and agitated. Aronofsky doesn't trust us to put these particular twos together, so we cut to his agitated face, just to make sure. God, it's so obvious. A better film-maker may have made us wait to see how his anxiety played out, but not here.
I'm sure Natalie Portman worked hard for this film, but even I could see that she's not a normally trained dancer because her shoulders don't have a dancer's mobility. This is not a very important point and it is not her dancing that makes or breaks the film. The part needs someone who can act and dance and she does very well. I was wondering why an actor who can't dance was chosen as opposed to vice versa, if that was the unavoidable choice.
My main problem with this film is that it cheats in setting up a narrative where we don't know what happened and anything is possible, and we get blood and sex and things leaping out of shadows. There is a scene when Thomas unexpectedly kisses Nina and she bites him. There is another scene where he invites her up to his apartment and we expect the terms of their relationship to be negotiated, probably horizontally, but he just asks her three questions and gives her homework. The three questions were 'do you have a boyfriend?', 'have you had many boyfriends?', 'are you a virgin?'. The homework is to go home and masturbate. I suppose this is so that she can practice her abandonment. In the next scene she is in her room at home, obediently masturbating, and we have a good opportunity to admire her teddy-bear collection (this is fortunate because in a later scene she puts them mercilessly down the garbage disposal chute). Then, my God, her mother comes into the room. Isn't this the number one cliche of all time - the child's fear of being interrupted by a parent while masturbating? This film isn't interesting enough to spend much time wondering which of these scenes happened. They are clearly there to make this film the potboiler it wants so much to be.
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