Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky is a genius. When you look at his film BLACK SWAN you will see why I think that. He took something that has only limited appeal to an audience like ballet and made it connectable for a huge audience. I mean this film started as a limited release in the States and is now all over the world and all over award shows.

And it deserves to be. It is definitly one of the best movies of the last year. First a quick undetailed summary about the story then I will cut right to the chase on my observations and stuff like that.

The film is about a ballet dancer that is offered to play the Swanqueen in "Swan Lake". She is so thrilled by this opportunity that she is given, that she first doesn´t realise how everything is changing around her. The pressure gets to her and she is kind of freaking out about stuff.

That pretty much sums up the entire plot.
It went into the movie with not a lot of knowledge what I will see on the screen, certainly I am not a huge fan of ballet and I wasn´t really sure if I could find a way to be interested in the fate of a ballet dancer if I absolutly don´t care about that sport. At the end of the film I was blown away. It is such a powerful, strong, weird, emotional, angry, pretty, nice peace of film that it is getting to you!

I thought the opening was chosen great by Aronofsky, to open with a ballet dance was certainly a great way to show the audience right away what they can expect and what they will see as a form of art in this movie. Also the summary that Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) provides at the start of the film about Swan Lake is a great way of putting the essence of the actual ballet play up their. I am sure not a lot of people went in the movie knowing exactly what Swan Lake is about, so it was a great way to putting up those news without it being forced in there, it was just a really casual way of letting everyone know what the play is all about.

The following scenes you could really see the "White Swan" in Nina (Natalie Portman), the pretty and talented dancer who just can´t let herself go. And that´s why she is not good enough for the role of the Swanqueen cause she can´t embody the evil twin - the "Black Swan". In these scenes you can really see a spark of what to come from Natalie Portman, who does a perfect job in here acting. She is actually pretty amazing and I can´t argue with her being award the Golden Globe for this great film. I mean throughout the entire movie she is doing a fantastic job in the dancing scenes and she delivers the splitted and confused personality of her character to a whole new level, she really brought it here.

That of course can be said about everyone who was involved in this project, when it comes down to the actress and actors. Mila Kunis was good as a really uncertain characterm that pumped up every once in a while and never left a real impression of what you have to think of her character.
Vincent Cassel played the boss of the play, he was a man, who was surrounded by a lot of controversy. A death former dancer, the unconventional choice of Nina as the Swanqueen. All the time I got the feeling that Vincent Cassel really belongs there, when you was observing the practice of the ballet dancers he really looked like he was the boss of the whole project. Really well done tho.
And last but not least the mother of Nina played by Barbara Hershey. The way she is angry at her daughter and herself for not really succeding as dancer, the way she walks the characters line between supporting her daughter and judging her daughter is really great. The entire main-acting front is great their.

Now back to the genius - Darren Aronosfky. I was stunned by some visuals that he had in his films. I loved the way he presented the insanity that caught Nina in the process of the movie. Nina is loosing herself literally and it is presented in such a great way that you really get caught up in the plot. First you just see rashes on her body or other stuff, then it expands to blood on the toe or the finger, than all of a sudden she sees dead people, then she sees herself in the mirror doing different stuff then her actual ego. In the end when she fights with Lilly and when she dances, how she morphs into the Black Swan is a great visual! I really, really enjoyed that kind of filmmaking style.
The kind of camera movement was also well done, the spinning camera during the pirouette were nice, the backshoulder angle throughout most of the conversations at the beginning was a great way to set a hint, that there was not only one part of Nina in the movie...and the shaky cam throughout the entire walking scenes was great, cause you got an impression that this movie is really moving at a fast pace, which is a good impression in a movie that is certainly not action-oriented.

I also enjoyed the insanity of Nina. Insanity is something really unexpected, with someone completly nuts you can direct your film and your character into every direction. So you can not see were is film or the character development is heading at the beginning of the film, you can make guesses and you get a bit of a general direction but never a detailed view what transpires next. It´s such an unpredictable aspect to a movie....just great.

Before I finally rate this movie I just wanna go at Aronofsky for the last time...he not only did a great job with the visuals, but also with the audio. I mean everytime the audio-line did a perfect job on pushing the action into a certain type of direction. In some moments there was just silence, to support the dramatic importance of the scene, then some scenes were casually underscored by a melody just to keep a certain rhythm, and last but not least the audio during the dancing presentation was awesome. The volume jacked up and with the melody of the final act of Swan Lake the scene became so monumental, that it is just hard to not get into a thrill watching it!

So this movie is just a great peace of Hollywood. The acting is superb, the visuals and the audio is great, the atmosphere is awesome, the insanity and paranoia is greatly featured in segments were you really have to pay attention to the film to catch the reality and the insane dreams. Just a great dramatic thriller with some aspects of a horror-movie with body horror and some kinds of shockers due to sudden appearings and reappearings of dead people.

It is hard to find anything bad about this movie, but I found something and it is really nothing big, but the women that died at the beginning of the movie and Mila Kunis looked really similar, which was sometimes confusing because Nina fantasised about the dead person and it was not clear everytime if it was Kunis or the dead girl that appeared!
Thats just a minor point but the casting or the make up could have helped there to make it clearer. But hey...if you count all those positives about this movie and you count in this little negative you will still end up with a perfect 10/10 rating. It is such a great movie that it has to be a 10! This movie is definitly generating more and more buzz and it will at least earn 5 Academy Award Nominations...MARK MY WORDS!