Black Swan dances in darkness and fantasy

One of the most frustrating things for moviegoers in the Philippines that are not content with the usual Hollywood flicks is having to wait for international films to come out locally. You hear all the buzz online and then you check the release dates and the film is months away. Sometimes the film has to get nominated or win an Oscar to merit its local release. And often, a lot of great small films never get theatrical releases. With smaller local films, the problems are even bigger, particularly for avid movie fans who want to go beyond the predictable local major studio movie. Economic and distribution concerns, planning release dates, and many other factors come into play – most of them invisible to us moviegoers. One wishes for more titles to be released more regularly, rather than getting dumped with clunkers such as live-action movies that use animation techniques to bring up some beloved character from the past. One major drawback of delayed release dates for viewer and reviewer alike are the expectations that are formed as all that buzz comes in. There’s also the span of time, the long waiting that makes seeing the film much more exciting because it has been withheld for so long. Thus we cannot help but either like the movie because the rest of the world has told us it is a masterpiece, or find it disappointing because it has failed to live up to its buzz. In the case of Black Swan, as a reviewer I’ve had to contend with the knowledge that many critics have dubbed this a great film, the numerous nominations and awards the film has garnered showing their approval. On the other hand I have many friends who, unable to wait for local release, found “alternative means" to view it and have been disappointed by the film; in particular, many say the dancing is not believable. It’s with all of this weight that I viewed Black Swan. What I found was an entrancing, dark fantasy – a nightmare of a film that, like all good nightmares, is gripping, harrowing, and sometimes doesn’t make sense.

Flawed yet beautiful One of the problems of director Darren Aronofsky has been his inability to hold back: when a moment comes up where it would be more effective for the director to show restraint, he has chosen rather badly to go maudlin. One only needs to look at the prolonged crying scenes of Hugh Jackman in Aronofksky’s The Fountain. He shows the same lack of restraint here, allowing emotions and a lot of weirdness to go overboard. But like many of his films, Black Swan is flawed yet beautiful. A retelling of Swan Lake (don’t worry viewers, like many of you I never got to watch the original ballet piece), Black Swan is Aronofsky’s take on the classic tale. He uses the basic plot as the centerpiece for portraying a much larger, more horrific story of transformation, loss of self, and tragedy. Natalie Portman plays a ballerina on her way up. She hopes to take the void filled by the outgoing star. She has to please the ballet director Vincent Cassell, while facing down threats from other members of the troupe, particularly an upstart played by Mila Kunis. At the same time, she has to deal with her overbearing and often scary mother played by Barbara Hershey, and her own neuroses. We see this film then as an exploration of internal and external struggles. What makes it frightening is how these internal struggles are manifested externally, as the metaphorical transformations become real. We witness Portman’s character as she goes through these physical changes, sprouting wing-like wounds on her shoulder blades and then on to progressively more violent injuries. It’s not for the squeamish when Portman sees a small wound on her fingertips and then proceeds to strip off a whole section of skin from her hand. We’re never sure whether these wounds are real or imagined, and it’s a power of the film that it keeps us guessing. Many would find fault with this kind of structure. The film’s POV, which is decidedly the main character’s, means that we view the world through an unreliable narrator. We’re never sure if what’s happening really happened, and much like her we don’t have a real grip on things. It’s a credit to the film that it doesn’t fall apart but rather, it utilizes this form to create more horror. At every corner, every step and every whisper is clouded by the unknown because we see the world through the lead character’s perspective that is so afraid, so unsure, so conflicted. Black Swan does a good job of employing sound design and editing to build suspense and terror. Notice the fluttering of wings, the sound of a short breath followed by a quick cut that builds a sense of fear, the sense that something bad could happen at any moment. At its heart Black Swan isn’t a film about ballet (the dance form serves merely as a frame for the allegory) but rather an Ars Poetica rolled into a horror flick. It’s a dark meditation on the nature of artistry, of the need to explore the dark side of our psyches in order to create sublime art, and the ravages such exploration does to the soul. In that sense Black Swan threatens and entices the viewer. It draws us in and asks us to look into the darkest parts of our hearts and admit what we would be willing to sacrifice to transcend the limitations of our mortal selves. At the same time it shows us the damaged, fractured psyche of someone who has given all of herself physically to her art, at the risk of losing everything else. It’s enthralling to watch a film that explores such edges. The key to enjoying Black Swan is to treat is as a dark fairy tale, a fantasy gone wrong. Walking in and expecting the literal destroys the experience. Take it as a nightmare, surreal and gripping and something that you want to get out of, but even when you’ve woken up you still feel that lingering sense of dread. – YA, GMA News