BLACK SWAN

BLACK SWAN
DIRECTED : DARREN ARONOFSKY
RELEASED : 2010

Black Swan is a cracking psychological melodrama and an artistic masterpiece. At its centre is young ballerina Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman. She is beautiful, vulnerable, sexually naive and susceptible to mental illness. To play the role of a lifetime, Nina must delve deep into her own dark side. As her hallucinations and anxiety attacks escalate with her progress in rehearsal, artistic break-through fuses with nervous breakdown. This is a movie about fear of ones body, fear of being supplanted in the affections of a powerful man, love of perfection, love of dance, and perhaps most importantly of all, passionate hatred for ones mother.

Nina, constantly striving for perfection, lives with her controlling mother who gave up dance to have her daughter. They live in a tiny New York City apartment. When the ballet's director decides to replace the aging prime ballerina for the new season production of "Swan Lake," Nina is his first choice. But she has competition in new sexually open dancer Lily (Mila Kunis). As Nina's anxiety intensifies about the role, she is worried about a weird feathery skin-rash and becomes convinced that her reflection in the mirror continues to stare at her after she has turned away. After securing the role, Nina is asked to "lose herself" to play the black swan,which she eventually does.

Nina often suffers from visual hallucinations, she sees a black-clad version of herself across the subway platform and again in the maze of hallways at Lincoln Center. Even the pink stuffed animals that adorn the bedroom she shares with her neurotic mother seem to come alive and mock her. She conjures up an array of fantasies and delusions, including a lesbian love scene with Lily. This scene is a symbol of how horribly the change in her is going wrong.

The film particularly focuses on one of the climatic moments of the film, specifically wherein it is evident that she has finally “let go” and has successfully personified the Black Swan, Odette, both in body and mind. Her metamorphosis is so complete, that Nina eventually develops webbed feet, bird-like legs and sprouts feathers and wings to actually become the black swan.

Nina was involved in a highly stressful competition, she had conflicted relationships with her mother and with her understudy, and she was the object of sexual advances by her director. Any one of these issues alone would be stressful, but experiencing all of them at once could be emotionally devastating, particularly for a young woman who is somewhat naive and sheltered. The tragedy of Nina is that perfection in one area of life has led to sacrifices in many of the others. One becomes perfect in every area except for life itself.

                                                                       

Nina’s hallucinations, constantly hearing voices point towards her psychosis which ultimately lead to her end. Previously throughout in the film, she often dresses in white or pink. Her former appearance is indicative of her naivety and virginal mentality, reflecting the attributes of he White Swan. As the movie progresses, especially towards the end, we see Nina (basically, her hallucinations) as she slowly develops webbed feet and feathers and turns into the swan. She sheds away her sweet, good girl side, to embrace her darker side in order to please her demanding, sexually aggressive director. Her hallucinations are so real that it is difficult to differ between what we are watching is her imagination or reality.                                                                                     

Black Swan is richly, sensually enjoyable and there is such a fascination in seeing Portman surrender to the madness and watch her face transmute into a horror-mask like a nightmare version. It is exciting, quite mad and often really scary depicting anorexia, self-harm and  schizophrenia in a beautiful frightening way.