“Black Swan” (2010) has only gotten more essential than ever. When I recently sat down to see it again, I was jubilated to uncover deeper themes and ideas than when I first saw this dazzling psychological ‘horror’ film directed by Darren Aronofsky. To me it’s an urgent allegorical tale that taps on our indispensable need to articulate our own identity in a world that demands so much from us. “Black Swan” encourages us to dig deep within ourselves – to stop being a victim – to stop being our own worst enemy and gain control of our actions. It serves as a sturdy reminder that we need to end feeling weak or at the mercy of external forces. Like other Aronofsky films – he’s navigating spiritual waters.
The plot is simple. Thomas – the artistic director of the NYC Ballet Company casts ballerina Nina in the lead of his new production of “Swan Lake.” For a ballerina, few parts are as coveted as the dual role of Odette and Odile, demanding technical mastery and emotional range to morph from vulnerable and pure Odette – the White Swan – to the confident and brave Odile – the Black Swan. These polar opposites traditionally represent a battle between good and evil. Thomas knows Nina can easily play the White Swan – but he tells her that she needs to work on discovering her Black Swan. The movie is a visual manifestation of Nina’s inner struggle – which is over-burdened with anxiety, confusion, guilt, alienation, sexual frustration and paranoia.
Aronofsky from the opening scene blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Let’s go even further – the moment the movie begins we’re navigating the dreams, fears and nightmares of the main character Nina. We will see everything from the vantage point of her mind. Aronofsky’s camera – follows her – focusing on the back of her neck – we’re experiencing what she sees and how she sees it. There are reflections introduced early on in the film – and there will be mirrors used in almost every scene. By looking into her reflection and mirrors, Nina – and the audience- are looking towards the depths of her unconsciousness. Near the end of the film, Nina and her doppelganger will fight and cause the mirror in her dressing room to break. The film is shot in muted colors – primarily using black, gray, whites – and childlike hints of pink. The whirling and dreamlike camera work is all handheld. There are influences of other films that takes us on a characters’ psychological world like Polanski’s “Repulsion” as well “The Tenant” and there’s also a delicious “All About Eve” melodramatic aspect added to articulate even further Nina’s inner conflict.
Natalie Portman won every award for Nina – and merited. She is possessed. In the second viewing, all the other performances are on her level. Mila Kunis – as her competitor, Barbara Hershey as her mom and Vincent Cassel as the director – all convey a complicit duality – just the way that the phenomenal Ruth Gordon did in “Rosemary’s Baby.”
Is this film a horror film? It depends on how hard it is for you to look in the mirror and face your own demons.
Thomas: “The only person standing in your way is you. It’s time to let her go. Lose yourself.”
Love,
Roger
Available to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Redbox and Google Play.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Mark Herman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin
Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mula Kunis, Barabra Hershey and Winona Ryder
108 minutes
Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky is an American filmmaker and screenwriter, born February 12, 1969 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, the son of teachers Charlotte and Abraham Aronofsky. He secured a reputation as a brash, intelligent filmmaker at the age of 29, with Pi, his 1998 feature directorial and screenwriting debut. A dizzying black and white odyssey, it tells the story of a brilliant mathematician (Sean Gullette) driven by his conviction that higher mathematics can be used to unlock the secrets of the natural world. Claiming such disparate influences as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the visual and editing style of Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto (Tokyo Fist, Tetsuo), Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Rod Serling, Philip K. Dick, the chaos theory, and the Jewish Kabbalah, Pi garnered Aronofsky the 1998 Sundance Festival’s Directing Award for Dramatic Competition. A self-described “Brooklyn hip-hop kid,” his upbringing was marked by his Jewish heritage (although in an interview he once disparagingly referred to himself as a “classically hypocritical high holiday Jew”), painting graffiti art on subway cars, and filmgoing in Times Square. An alumnus of the New York public school system, he attended Harvard, where he studied live action and animation and met future collaborator and Pi star Sean Gullette. He received international acclaim for his senior thesis film, Supermarket Sweep, which also starred Gullette, and went on to earn an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute. After the critical success of Pi, which Aronofsky made with $60,000 borrowed from family and friends and what must have been half of New York City’s abandoned computer equipment, the maverick embarked on his next major project entitled Requiem for a Dream, and developed at the Sundance Lab, the picture stars Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and Ellen Burstyn. Requiem drew critical raves from coast to coast from all but the most discerning of reviewers.Meanwhile, Aronofsky worked on additional projects and pursued additional leads. Aronofsky ducked out of the limelight for a few years, but made a return in 2006 with the much-delayed, much-hyped The Fountain, a mystical, reality-shifiting gloss on 2001. In 2008 he enjoyed awards and box office success with the low-budget drama The Wrestler, reviving the career of Mickey Rourke in the process. Two years later he would direct Natalie Portman in her Oscar-winning turn as a psychologically disturbed ballet dancer in Black Swan, which received a total of 5 nominations at the Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. Aronofsky’s sixth film, the biblically inspired epic Noah, was released in 2014 becoming Aronofsky’s first film to open at Number 1 at box office. His seventh film, the psychological horror mother! (2017), sparked controversy upon release due to its biblical allegories and depiction of violence, and polarized audiences.
The long, arduous journey to get Black Swan made
Four weeks before Black Swan was set to begin filming, Darren Aronofsky’s dark creature almost died. After years of searching for money, Aronofsky, director of art house favorites Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, finally had found the $15 million-plus he needed to make his film — which centers on a ballerina who gets her big break then seems to lose her mind — when he learned that the company funding it was backing out. “We got pretty deep in, and we were close to being out of money many times,” Aronofsky says. “It was a tough situation.”
About 400 cast and crew members had been hired, hundreds of thousands was spent, and shooting was set to commence with a 43-day schedule in New York — and it all seemed for nothing. How Swan, avoided death is a tale with nearly as much drama as the Tchaikovsky ballet that gives the film its title. Aronofsky began thinking of making a movie set in the ballet world nine years ago, when he met Natalie Portman at the divey Howard Johnson’s coffee shop in New York’s Times Square.
At the time, the filmmaker had made the modestly budgeted Pi and the highly regarded Requiem, and Portman was a 20-year-old actress best known for her role in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. They were drawn to the idea for different reasons: Aronofsky because his sister pursued ballet in high school, Portman because she had longed to be in a movie about ballet since she was 14. Over coffee, the two discussed Aronofsky’s initial idea of exploring the relationship between artist and ego, and how having an inflated ego without a strong sense of self can wreak havoc on one’s mental state. Aronofsky had an idea but no script. Thinking of a story that might contain some of the themes he wanted to explore, he recalled another screenplay he had read: Andres Heinz’s spec script The Understudy, which Mike Medavoy’s Phoenix Pictures had offered to Aronofsky shortly after he completed Pi…. “It had a really good thriller engine, and it was based a lot on [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky’s The Double, which I was a big fan of,” says Aronofsky, referring to the 1846 Russian novella in which a man meets his doppelganger and slowly goes mad. The script also had hints of 1950’s All About Eve, in which a conniving understudy claws her way to a stage role…
With the screenplay in progress, Aronofsky turned his attention to another film with its share of problems: The Wrestler. There, he faced the challenge of securing backers who would commit only if the movie starred Nicolas Cage, rather than Mickey Rourke, whom Aronofsky was determined to cast. As he worked on Wrestler, he continued to develop other projects, signing to work on Phoenix’s Robocop reboot in June 2008. That very-different movie, ironically, put Swan back at center stage for the director.
When Robocop stalled because of financial problems, Aronofsky decided to pursue the ballet script as his next helming project. At about the same time, Mark Heyman, a principal at Aronofsky’s production company Protozoa, began tinkering with the ballet script — still known as The Understudy — using the black swan/white swan metaphor from Swan Lake as a narrative device.
“On some levels, it’s a thriller and horror film; on other levels, it’s a drama,” Heyman says. “There’s also this documentary ballet aspect to it. The biggest single challenge was balancing all that out. It’s a hybrid, and I don’t think it fits comfortably in any box.” Perhaps not, but the new script was enough to get the project moving again. Protozoa and Phoenix acquired rights back from Universal, and with Portman attached, Aronofsky returned to developing the film. Wrestler had been completed by then, and Aronofsky — and Rourke — were drawing the best reviews of their careers. While promoting that picture on the awards circuit in early 2009, Aronofsky kicked Swan into life.
After several revisions to the script, Aronofsky and producer Scott Franklin were thrilled with their finished work and delighted with their potential cast. They offered the movie to Universal, which passed — “It didn’t fit their mold,” Franklin says. They tried Fox Searchlight. Aronofsky was optimistic, but production chief Claudia Lewis — who had developed a good working relationship with Protozoa on Wrestler — also passed. “I’m giving them a sexy genre film with a legitimate movie star, and it was harder to make,” Aronofsky says. But Lewis’ notes proved instrumental in taking Swan to the next step. “We implemented 80% of them,” Franklin says. With their latest revision — in which much of the dialogue was unrecognizable compared with the script’s initial drafts — Aronofsky and Franklin found backing from Rick Schwartz’s Overnight Films, which also financed Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.
Then, four weeks before the shoot, Overnight pulled the plug after it became clear that its funding was not as robust as originally envisioned. Desperate, Aronofsky and Franklin returned to Searchlight. But the studio remained cautious. Anxiety rose to a boiling point as Portman was slated to work imminently on the big-budget film Thor, which effectively would have killed Swan or delayed it for years. Mere days before producers would have had to pull the plug, a minor miracle happened when Cross Creek Pictures president Brian Oliver stepped in. Oliver, who had known Franklin for more than a decade, felt strongly that Aronofsky could bring Swan to life. He also was convinced it was a matter of time before Searchlight signed on. So Cross Creek — a $40 million fund from private investors that launched last year — approached the Fox unit, offering to split financing in a worldwide deal. “It instantly became a passion project for us,” Oliver says. “We were working 24 hours trying to get deals done in the last week. Fox really wanted it to happen, but they’re probably a little more strict with what they can do and can’t.” Only a day before shooting was scheduled to begin Dec. 7 in New York, Searchlight said yes. The movie was a go.
(Hollywood Reporter)
Becoming Nina the ballerina
Natalie Portman studied ballet from the age 4 to 12, at which point she turned her focus to her acting career. “As a child, I idealized [ballet] because, as a little girl, you just think of it as this pretty, light, delicate and feminine thing,” she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “You see how much darker the world is when you’re immersed in it.”
In Black Swan, Portman plays Nina, who lands the lead role in a major production of Swan Lake. She’s tasked with playing both the innocent White Swan and the darker, more sensual Black Swan — both of them avatars for characters competing for the love of a prince. Nina, who is somewhat reserved, struggles with playing the Black Swan. As she begins to dance, however, she realizes her understudy (Mila Kunis) may be trying to steal her part — and a dark side of Nina begins to emerge.
Both Portman and Kunis started preparing for their roles more than a year in advance, to make their bodies look like those of professional dancers. The actresses trained for hours a day with a ballerina from the New York City Ballet. By the end, Portman was dancing several hours a day, swimming miles and cross-training, losing almost 20 pounds in the process. Her body, she says, paid a price: Her toenails fell off, her feet became calloused and she dislocated a rib during a lift.
“But it wasn’t the end of the world,” she says. “Real dancers dance with such incredible injuries that you wouldn’t even believe. It’s a nightmare for them to be replaced once they’ve made it to the top and they get these roles. [So] they will dance with a sprained ankle or torn plantar fascia or twisted necks just to make sure they can keep their moment.”
(NPR)