Requiem for a Swan

Darren Aronofsky's black-swan ballet flick bears about as much resemblance to real ballet as Speed Racer to the Daytona 500, Tron to the inner workings of Microsoft Office. This alone isn't damning. There are plenty of sports dramas that get the details wrong but still manage to entertain. I'm lookin' at you, Rocky. Of course, in the hands of Sly Stallone, The Black Swan would've featured Natalie Portman as a plucky upstart from Scranton. Her mother was a short-order cook and her dad was a bowling ball. She wanted to be a Sugar Plum fairy in The Nutcracker, but instead she got cast as Clara's slipper. It doesn't matter. She meets the boy of her dreams, a television repairman named Enzio. They move to Seacacus and open a dance school. The end.

Instead, we are subjected to a load of hack-job, gussied-up torture porn by one of Hollywood's most egregious misogynists. Despite it's grand guignol drag, it is really a dowdy, ten-million-times-before-told tale of art and madness that proposes itself as a psychological thriller even though its psychology is about as insightful as the Saw franchise. Art is interesting, and the real physical rigor of ballet would make an appealingly concrete metaphor for the pain, repetition, dedication, commitment, and struggle behind great art and great performance. As a vehicle for trite mad scenes and a lot of bogus crap about how performers must immolate themselves in order to achieve transcendence, how genius is insanity, it falls, you'll pardon me, flat on its skinny ass. Maybe he should've a movie about a mad opera singer turning into a real Walkyrie, although, I don't know, I guess when you're dedicated to setting Natalie Portman writhing around with her hand in her panties or whatever the notion of some fleshy Brunhilde jumping into the orchestra pit loses some appeal.

It's certainly true that dancers' bodies are subject to brutal conditioning that would put the toughest guys in the NFL on the inactive list, and it's also true, although the extent is exaggerated, that female dancers in particular are prone to eating problems in the obsessive pursuit of physical perfection, and yet as compared to other performers and artists I have known, I find dancers to be generally the least nutso. A lot of them frankly have the zoned-out bliss of a yoga teacher. Well, fuck, a lot of them become yoga teachers, or they get a job selling subscriptions for the non-profit down the road. Like professional athletes, their careers are short; the human body hits its physical peak early, and that's simply that. It is a competitive business. Some people do flame out, unable to take the pressure or live up to their potential, but those who make it into a professional company, an elite company, are very often happy. They are, after all, living their dream.

This is what Aronofsky misses most and why his portait of an artist, even a crazy one, is so unconvincing and frankly boring. I presume that our friend Darren really likes making movies, even if raising money is a grind and production an administrative nightmare, a series of sleepless nights and too-long days eating lousy food and living in hotels. There is a joy in achievement after struggle. Yet not once do we see Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers enjoy herself. Nowhere are we permitted some brief glimpse of the joy of great performance. Oh, what, is she doing it because of her central-casting stage mother? Um, Darren, what's my motivation? You're crazy, Natalie. That's your motivation. Now, hold still while we apply this blood to your naked body. Look, even Peter Shaffer, a playwright with the emotional insight of a goldfish whose owner left a book of Freud case studies open on the credenza beside the tank, figured out that Doomed-Genius Composer© Mozart really fucking liked music, was transported by it, was an instrument of a sort of divinity, whose own soul resonated with the notes. Prima ballerina Natalie Portman is an instrument, all right, like a fleshlight. There is a scene meant, I don't know, to imply her burgeoning sexual seductiveness, in which an old perv masturbates through his pants while making kissy noises at her on the subway. Darren Aronofsky, that man is you.

Vincent Cassel is the Artistic Director (which Aronofsky has confused with a choreographer, which he has in turn confused for a stage director), and he spends the first half of the movie reading the program notes from the student matinee and the second half telling Natalie that she'll never be Odile unless she throws her vag all over the stage and "lets go." He is French, so needless to say he is a Lothario. "That was me seducing you when it should've been the other way around." Oh, brother. Fabio wasn't available? The whole thing reads like Nora Roberts adapted for the screen by John Carpenter. It's as gross as Japanese porno and dull as your daughter's dance recital.