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.

The pleasure of slow reading

I’m a fast reader. I’ve always been a fast reader, ever since I learned to read, and went racing ahead of the rest of the class through the Village With Three Corners series. But lately I’ve been starting to think that maybe I read too fast.

I remember reading in bed when I was a kid. My mum would tell me I could read to the end of the next chapter, or whatever, and then I had to put out the light. But sometimes I would be so into the book that I would skim-read ahead of that, just to find out what was going to happen. Skim-reading is, of course, a very useful skill if you have a lot of academic reading to get through, but it’s not the best way to appreciate the finer points of a good novel. Sometimes I find that it’s easy to concentrate on the dialogue and the action and not to read the description too carefully, but I know that I miss out when I do that.

I realised to what extent this was the case recently, when talking to people who read much more slowly than me. Until then, if anything, I’d assumed I had the advantage over them. After all, I could get through so many more books than they could. And that, in turn, meant I was much more open to discovering new things – it’s easier to take a risk on a book you’re not sure about when you don’t feel it’s too big a time commitment to get through it.

However, a couple of people have mentioned to me that when they read, they hear all the voices in their heads, as though it were being read aloud to them. This was a revelation to me, as I do no such thing.

Language is an interesting thing – the letters and words represent sounds, which in turn represent objects or concepts in the real world. But when we read, our brains don’t have to do that whole process – we can look at a word we recognise and our brains can leap straight to the meaning without having to sound it out. Which is great, of course, or we’d all be struggling through everything with our lips moving. But I’m starting to think that if our brains rush through the process too fast we will miss out. Reading literature is not just about getting the meaning, but about the way that the language itself is crafted. For example, for me, I can appreciate poetry – which is all about the use of language and hardly about story at all – much better if it is read aloud than if I read it to myself.

I’ve started trying to consciously slow my reading pace down, but it’s not always easy – I suppose old habits are hard to break. However, I’m currently reading The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, and those books are working wonders at turning me into a slow reader. McCarthy never rushes the pace – he describes long horseback journeys in such detail, and so fully and believably realises the passing landscapes, that they almost seem to be happening in real time. You get a real sense of the time and distance that everything takes. Long passages can pass without action and dialogue, and McCarthy can move seamlessly from description of setting, to the characters’ external thoughts, or to the sorts of philosophical musings that few modern writers could attempt without sounding trite.

Just one example of an extract where the writing stopped me in my tracks and made me read it again, just to appreciate it fully:

“Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightening glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” (All the Pretty Horses)

Who wouldn’t want to read that slowly?

Guest post at Jo and The Novelist

This week, I am the guest poster over at Jo and the Novelist, a great blog all about the joys of writing (and procrastination). In honour of NatNoWriMo, Jo has a selection of guests posting on various topics relating to writing, and I'm on there today discussing journalism.

Why Stephen King is wrong about vampires

So Stephen King has announced that he is going to make vampires scary again, complaining that the genre has been ‘hijacked by a lot of soft focus romance’. Now, I think he has a very interesting point. Vampires used to be pure evil, bloodthirsty monsters. These days we have the likes of Buffy, True Blood and the Twilight series – we see vampires struggling with their consciences, falling in love with humans, trying to resist the urge to drink blood. King certainly seems to have put his finger on a trend here. But the vampire myth has existed in many different forms in many different parts of the world, the ‘facts’ associated with the lore have been constantly evolving as long as it has existed. So is this latest iteration really robbing the myth of its power?

First of all, although the trend for depicting human-vampire romances may be a recent one, I believe that it does have a solid grounding in the history of the genre. After all, sex has been a big part of the vampire myth for a long time now. Check out the great book of the genre Dracula or the lesser-known Carmilla for plenty of barely-repressed sexual imagery. Dracula can tell us lots about how the Victorians viewed female sexuality as something dangerous and perverse. It seems both logical and inevitable that this sexual subtext should, in our more permissive times, be expressed more explicitly in sexual and romantic relationships between humans and vampires.

Much as I am not a fan of Twilight and its icky abstinence message, it could still be argued that Stephanie Meyer’s use of feeding as a metaphor for premarital sex is at least in keeping with the myth. (Even if the same cannot be said for the whole ‘sparkling in the sunlight’ thing!)

When Buffy, in later seasons of the programme, found herself drawn into a complex love-hate relationship with bad boy vampire Spike, the storyline was rich with symbolism regarding her own darker impulses – the side of herself that her work as the Slayer had brought her into contact with, leading her to feel isolated from the normal world and from her friends. Spike’s character arc, and their relationship, was one of my favourite things about the programme, precisely because it was far from straightforward. Spike wasn’t noble like Angel, but nor was he a mindless killing machine that needed to be staked on sight like most of the other vamps in the series. He was a bad guy all right (to start out with, anyway), but he was also funny, cool and capable of emotion, and it was that tension that made his character so compelling.

Similarly, if we look at Eli in Let the Right One In, we see a character who is far from the restrained nature of an Angel or an Edward Cullen. She kills people and she drinks their blood – neither the book nor the film shy away from the true horror of that. However, she genuinely cares for Oskar, and there is a strong sense of how bleak and isolated her life is. To me, a work that can make you feel pity for someone who has committed such terrible crimes is far more compelling than one about a mindless killing machine.

Again, this twist on the myth is not entirely new. For example, if we look at the novel Dracula, although the vampires are as much bloodthirsty monsters as King could wish for, there is also a transitional stage – the process of becoming a vampire is not instant but takes place over a period of days or even weeks. We see this with Lucy, who walks around in a strange, dazed, liminal state for some time before dying and returning as a vampire, and we see it again with Mina – the attempt to reverse the process and save her life forms the climax of the novel. The representation of someone caught between their humanity and their more bestial urges was particularly potent in the late Victorian period, as society reeled from the implications of Darwinism, and it remains a powerful image today.

In True Blood, we see vampirism pressed into service as a metaphor for all kinds of ‘otherness’: vampires have ‘come out of the coffin’, graffiti is seen saying ‘god hates fangs’, meanwhile new vampire Jessica’s experiences of the changes she is undergoing are compared to puberty, and the Fellowship of the Sun church preach hate towards vampires and secretly plan to tie one to a cross to burn in the morning sun.  However, what I find most interesting about True Blood is the complete lack of unity in the vampire world. Some of them toe the line and drink synthetic blood, others see humans as mere prey, and still others are on the defensive, trying to protect their own kind. Similarly, the humans have wildly varying levels of tolerance for vampires. Somehow, it all seems oddly believable. If vampires really did exist, surely there would be good ones, evil ones, and many, many more somewhere in between – just like with humans.

So, I’m sure Stephen King’s argument would be – so what’s the point? If vampires are just like humans, why write about them at all?

Well, I certainly don’t think his kind of vampires have no place in the myth. They haven’t died out, and they still have appeal. But I think that vampirism is a potent symbol for all humanity’s darkest urges. And for that reason, I believe, we are fascinated by these representations of creatures that are struggling with these urges, caught between their baser instincts and their better nature.

TV Review: This is England '86

One of the things that made the film This is England seem so sad was that – at the risk of sounding like someone’s mother – they were such a nice group of kids until that racist one came along. Before I saw it, all I knew was that it was about a boy falling in with a gang of skinheads. So I sort of assumed they’d all be a bad influence on him. Instead, Woody, Lol and the others take Shaun under their collective wing and, despite being older and something of a group of troublemakers, offer him genuine friendship. They are such an appealing, if flawed, set of characters that it’s all the more upsetting when events start to take a darker turn.

With this in mind, I was really happy to hear that director Shane Meadows had made a TV series that reunited the fantastic young cast to further develop the characters. Without (so far) the presence of white supremacist Combo (Stephen Graham) the programme focuses more on the everyday lives of the protagonists three years after the events of the film, and reflects further on the grim realities of a northern town blighted by unemployment and Thatcherism.

In the first episode, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) had distanced himself from his old friends, feeling guilty about what happened to Milky (Andrew Shim). Last night’s second episode saw him reunited with the gang. It started as with lots of light-hearted action involving drinking and partying, with plenty of laughs, of the kind that make you really warm to the characters. However, just as in the original film, this only made the darker moments hit harder. Lol (Vicky McClure), already struggling with her relationship with Woody (Joe Gilgun), was blindsided by the return of her long-absent father. McClure plays Lol’s emotional turmoil astonishingly well, but it’s the sense of the impact her actions will have on the cast of supporting characters that helps to bring it home to the audience.

Throughout, the camera lingers over a washed out landscape of council flats, bare streets and boarded up houses, backed by a lingering piano soundtrack that contrasts strikingly with the upbeat cotemporary music that accompanies the skinheads’ exploits. It brings home the hopelessness of the characters’ environment – the dearth of opportunities to escape or change. In those bleak shots we see the explanation for everything that happens to the characters.

My 3D dilemma

This is probably not a great confession to make on a film-related blog but I didn’t see Avatar the first time round. Now it’s back, re-released and even longer, and so the dilemma I had the first time round returned to bug me.

The dilemma was this: if you’re going to pay money to see something at the cinema – and pay the extra cost for 3D at that – you want to be at least fairly confident you’re going to enjoy it. If you’re feeling doubtful, you normally have the option of giving it a miss, safe in the knowledge that you can always watch it on DVD later. However, in the case of Avatar, that’s not such a good option. The main selling point of the film was its cutting-edge effects, so if you’re going to watch it, it might as well be on the big screen in all its 3D glory.

Now, there’s two ways at looking at this situation. One: 3D is a great new way to restore the sense of cinema as an experience, to take us back to the good old days when going to the movies felt special, when it was worth doing for its own sake, as opposed to just waiting for the DVD or downloading a dodgy pirate copy. Two: It’s a big con. The hype about 3D is a way of strong-arming you into paying ten or twelve quid to see something that’s really had pretty mediocre reviews in terms of plot, script, etc. The special effects are its one big selling point and, conveniently enough, they’re just not the same if you choose any of the cheaper viewing options.

I’m still torn by this dilemma, but, in the end, having a day off work and some time to kill, I went by myself to an afternoon showing of the re-released version. Having heard some truly terrible things about it from some people, I had set my expectations pretty low, and so I was actually pleasantly surprised – although, let’s be clear, that’s not exactly saying much. It certainly wasn’t painfully bad. It was just pretty standard Hollywood fare, with big battles, a fairly conventional environmental message, and a racially dubious but fairly common ‘noble savage’ trope. The script was pedestrian, but not as clunky as, say, the new Star Wars films.

My main gripe was the length – I have a very low tolerance for overlong films, even if they’re good. It just seems to show a cavalier disregard for the audience’s comfort: ‘Oh, I know other filmmakers have to stick to a reasonable length, but what I have to say is just so important.’ However, on the plus side – if you can call it that – I wasn’t too gripped to pop out for a toilet break when I needed one. There was a handy montage sequence where the hero is learning to become a Na’vi that was ideal for the purpose.

On the visual side, it delivered everything it promised, and I was pretty happy just to sit and stare at it for a while. Although there was a lot of action, it was nice to see special effects being used for something other than explosions – the world of Pandora was beautifully realised. Vast trees, floating mountains, glow-in-the-dark plants, and stunning flying sequences on the backs of dragon-like creatures all worked wonderfully well with the 3D to create a really immersive world. If only someone could match that kind of attention to detail with a truly great script and characters.

So, after finally watching this film, I’m not sure I’m any closer to resolving how I feel about the 3D revolution. I suppose it’s really no different to any other advance in special effects – it’s all very well, but you simply cannot neglect the other elements of good filmmaking. Avatar did a great job of making the most of the novelty of the technology, but, in future, I’ll probably be making my viewing selections based on something other than whether or not it’s in 3D. If a great film comes along that also happens to be available in a great 3D version – well, that will just be a bonus.