Black Swan

In theaters today: Another Year [limited], Blue Valentine [limited]

New on DVD/Blu-ray: The American, And Soon the Darkness, Resident Evil: Afterlife

Ballet is a world of strict conformity and discipline. Ballerinas are not referred to as women, or even dancers, but girls. Operating within these lines, male-dominated ballet’s constructed reality is inherently antithetical to a woman’s coming of age. Darren Aronofsky’s new psychological thriller Black Swan swims in this crucible where grace and independence are sacrifices set at the alter of a beautiful performance.

Natalie Portman stars as Nina—Spanish for “girl”—a disciplined and technically skilled young dancer who lives with her overly involved former ballerina mother and covets the lead role in her New York City company’s new performance of Tchaikovski’s Swan Lake. Standing in Nina’s way is the company’s newest addition Lily, played free-spirited and rebellious by Mila Kunis. Lily is bold and sensual while Nina is timid and virginal. Lily loses herself in her performances while Nina’s calculated dance can be too mechanical, too perfectly controlled, for her own good.

Tasked with portraying both the innocent White Swan and the seductive and dangerous Black Swan, Nina is pushed to her limits by a demanding director, played by the coherently cruel Vincent Cassel, and her strangely sheltering mother, Barbara Hershey. As pressure mounts and opening night looms, Nina begins to loose her grip on reality.

Swan Lake tells the story of a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer’s curse, and Aronofsky’s Black Swan uses that mythology to spin a tantalizing modern noir thriller in the classic Roman Polanski mold. Black Swan has no sorcerer, though, and its curse is not a magical one, but the curse of age. Leaving childhood behind can be a harrowing path, and Nina undergoes an amazing, if gothically rendered, transformation on the road to self-discovery.

In a meta way, Portman as an actress, has finally embraced the darker Black Swan within herself with this role. You’ve never seen Portman like this before. Nina’s challenge is to find joy in life for herself, not her mother or her director or her audience, and it is meeting this challenge that allows her to finally leave her childish ways behind and embrace her destiny as the Swan Queen. Likewise, Black Swan ought to open a whole new chapter in Portman’s career. It is a career-defining turn that is certain to earn her an Oscar nomination if not more. The actress trained for months on end to convincingly perform these dances herself, and her naturally thin frame is wracked clear to the bone and the muscle.

Aronofsky’s camerawork is loose, creative and intimate, not unlike the look of his stunning 2008 drama The Wrestler. The film’s score, based largely on Tchaikovski’s work, of course, is also a revelation, not so much in its power and melody but in the way Aaronofsky uses it to punctuate and penetrate the non-performance sequences of the film.

Twice I felt Aronofsky took Black Swan too far into the horror genre, opting for quick jumps and scares when more subtly would have better served the story and sustained the mood of the film, but overall it is a startling and affecting piece of work unlike anything I have every seen, a delicate balance of the wild unknown and graceful choreography.