Review: Black Swan

Black Swan is about a ballet dancer's self-destructive quest for perfection. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a driven, hard-working dancer, whose dreams seem to have come true when she is cast as the lead in Swan Lake. But the part involves playing a dual role, and while she finds it easy to play the innocent White Swan, the sensual and seductive Black Swan is more of a challenge. Her controlling and manipulative director (Vincent Cassel) suggests that she is too repressed to play the Black Swan, and, as Nina becomes convinced that a new dancer in the company (Mila Kunis) is out to steal her part, her mind begins to unravel.

It is interesting to compare Black Swan to director Darren Aronofsky's previous film The Wrestler. Both focus on central characters pushing their bodies to extremes, and both are brutal in their depiction of the physicality of their disciplines. Natalie Portman's gaunt physique and shots of her bruised and bleeding toes showed the toll that ballet takes on the body and has the power to make the audience wince just as much as the more violent injuries that Mickey Rourke's character sustained in The Wrestler. However, where The Wrestler was essentially a naturalistic, character-driven film, Black Swan is driven by ideas, symbolism and mythology.

The world that Black Swan presents is heightened, dramatic and full of surreal imagery. There is uncertainty as to which events are real, and which are in Nina's mind. It verges on the melodramatic but I thought it avoided tipping over into silliness because it was well-executed, tense, and with a brilliant performance from Natalie Portman. I don’t believe you have to be in a naturalistic film to give a brilliant  performance – you just have to be totally convincing within the world of the film, and I thought Portman’s performance as nervy perfectionist Nina was spot on.

There is a wonderfully creepy atmosphere throughout the film - I felt very on edge, and came out feeling slightly drained - and there are some moments that genuinely make you jump. The focus on the injuries caused by ballet is nicely carried through with more physically repulsive shots of feathers bursting through skin, and so on. 

However, this is no ordinary thriller - Aronofsky has exploited the White Swan/Black Swan motif to great effect, to highlight the contradictory roles of virgin and whore that women are expected to embody. The director demands that she 'loosen up' in order to dance the Black Swan, but this is less a wish for her to genuinely be herself than an attempt at gaining some creepy sexual gratification for himself. His opposite figure is Nina's equally controlling mother (Barbara Hershey), a former dancer who wishes to mould her daughter into the success she never was. These conflicting pressures are what force Nina down the road to madness. These concepts might sound high-minded and abstract, but they are fully integrated into the drama of the film, making it a completely gripping experience.

Review: Big Fat Gypsy Weddings

By now it’s clear that, in spite of the title, this programme is not about sneering at the stupid gypsies and their tacky weddings. It’s a grown-up documentary that gives us an insight into the lives of a group of people who are so ‘other’ to mainstream society that not only did we know nothing about their culture, but, frankly, it would never even have occurred to us to wonder until now.

However, there’s an obvious tension in this type of documentary between trying to paint a sympathetic portrait of a beleaguered community trying desperately to keep their traditions alive, and the awareness that some of those traditions are deeply and unpleasantly sexist. There’s the strictly-enforced gender roles, the entrenched purity myth and the control of young women’s sexuality, the focus on preserving their ‘reputation’, and the disturbing practice of ‘grabbing’, where girls remain passive while boys resort to rough or even violent tactics to get a kiss. Never mind mocking them for their massive dresses, these were the elements that really bothered me (although I’m sure it could be argued the dresses were connected – there’s a certain element of ‘suffer to be beautiful’ when young women are physically scarred by the weight of their clothing).*

Overall, I think the programme did a pretty good job of handling all these issues with what is really the only valid option in such cases – by editorialising as little as possible and by giving the subjects a chance to speak for themselves. And, in spite of everything, most of the participants came off as surprisingly sympathetic and normal – the 17-year-old brides in both last night's and last week’s episode seemed frank, level-headed and, above all, human. It was a reminder that, much as we might abhor aspects of a culture, any society is made up of individuals, who are worth treating with respect and an open mind.

*Although this was not the point of the documentary, it is also worth pointing out that all of these issues are merely magnified and more overt versions of ones still widespread in mainstream society today.