Black Swan (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Coast Creek Pictures, protozoa Pictures, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film about the fiercely competitive world of professional ballet that won the Academy Award for Best Actress for its star, Natalie Portman. She played Nina Sayers, a young dancer who as the film opens is up for the leading role in a new production of Tchaikovsky’s classic story ballet Swan Lake. Black Swan – no definite article in the title, as I’d always assumed (search imdb.com for The Black Swan and the first thing that comes up is a Tyrone Power costume drama from 1942) – began as a story by Andrés Heinz and was worked up into a screenplay by him with Mark Heyman and John J. McLaughlin. I had high hopes for this, at ieast in part because my late friend and home-care client Robert Cavanaugh loved it – I’m not sure if he thought it was the greatest movie ever made, but it was right up there – and I thought this might be the film that finally displaced The Red Shoes as the greatest movie about ballet ever made. Indeed it might have been if the screenwriters and director had known when to stop instead of larding on the melodrama until it reached absurd proportions.

Black Swan centers around the rivalry between Nina and fellow up-and-coming ballerina Lily (an electrifying performance by Mila Kunis, who deserved an Academy Award as much as Portman did) and artistparallels the rivalry of their characters to the plot of Swan Lake. In the ballet, Prince Siegfried is alone in a forest when he stumbled on a sorcerer named Rothbart and his prisoner, Odette, a woman he has turned into a swan through his magical powers. According to the plot, Odette can only be freed from this curse by the true love of a good man – only Rothbart, to make sure this doesn’t happen, sends Odette’s evil twin sister Odile, the Black Swan (who is always played by the same dancer as Odette), to seduce Siegfried. In the end Odette, cursed by her lover’s infidelity to remain a swan for the rest of her life, finally achieves her liberation by committing suicide. (Stravinsky’s first ballet, The Firebird, has the same basic plot – the hero is called Ivan, the sorcerer is Kastchei, and the Firebird takes the place of the swan, though unilie Odette she does not become Ivan’s love interest at the end and Ivan falls for Taormina, one of the 13 princesses Kastchei has enslaved, instead.)

The film’s credits make the parallel explicit by listing Portman as playing “Nina/The Swan Queen” and Kunis as “Lily/The Black Swan.” Nina’s stage mother, who tried for ballet stardom herself (at one point Nina taunts her by saying, “At least I got a starring role! You never got out of the corps!” – i.e., the corps de ballet, ballet’s equivalent of a chorus line), is listed as “The Queen” and is played by Barbara Hershey, while Winona Ryder has a brief role as over-the-hill ballerina Beth Macintyre, “The Dying Swan.” Beth is unceremoniously fired by the ballet’s fierce and domineering artistic director, Thomas Leroy (Vindent Cassel, whom the credits list as “The Gentleman” even though he’s anything but that). With all the hot young women playing up to him and all too many of them offering their bodies to him in exchange for better parts, Thomas Leroy comes off as a better-looking version of Harvey Weinstein. One of the curious things about Black Swan is it’s full of scenes that may or may not be part of the story’s reality and may or may not represent dreams or hallucinations of the heroine.

In one series of scenes, Lily tricks Nina into going out with her for a night on the town just a day and a half before the big Swan Lake production is set to open, and they meet up with two young men named Tom (Toby Hemingway) and Anthony (future Marvel regular Sebastian Stan), though Lily insists on calling them “Tom and Jerry” after the cartoon characters. It’s never clear whether Tom and Anthony are a Gay couple or out on the prowl for hot young women who look like ballerinas, and later Nina and Lily end up in a quite exciting soft-core Lesbian porn scene in Nina’s bedroom, while Nina locks the door to keep her mom from bursting in and interrupting things – only the next day at the ballet company Lily denies that any such thing happened and ridicules Nina for having Lesbian fantasies about her. The stress Nina is under as she prepares for her first big role, has to deal with Leroy’s contemptujous dismissal of her as having the qualities needed to play Odette but not her Black Swan counterpart, confronts the indignity of Lily being appointed as her understudy (an appointment Leroy insists upon, and later when she and we catch then in the hot throes of sexual passion we realize why) and finally shows up for her Big Nignt only to find Lily already rehearsing and prepping for the starring role, forces her to lose it.

Midway through the performance, just as the stressed-out Nina has fallen off the arm of Prince Siegfried (Benjamin Millepied as “David,” who dances Siegfried in the ballet) and thus wrecked the part of the ballet she is supposed to be good at, Nina and Lily get into a big fight that we think ends with Nina killing Lily, albeit in self-defense, and then stashing her body in a backstage closet and putting a blanket over the spilled blood. Then Nina goes on for the Black Swan act and dances it stunningly – only to find that Lily is very much alive and she pulls away the blanket and sees no blood under it. At the end of Act IV, when Odette is supposed to free herself from Rothbart’s enchantment by killing herself, Nina apparently stabs herself with a shard of broken glass from her assault on Lily – which may or may not have happened. As a story of a young, talented ballerina being destroyed by the pressures of her career and her life, Black Swan doesn’t begin to come close to The Red Shoes – although, as I said before, it could have come a lot closer if the makers had just known when to stop. And did I mention the mysterious scratches on Nina’s back, which may or may not be self-inflicted, and the bleeding she does not only in her feet (which we can understand, since one thing Black Swan is good at is showing the sheer level of physical stress ballet dancing puts on the people who do it) but from her fingers as well?

It’s almost as if Black Swan is a film with a moral, and the moral is (to paraphrase Willie Nelson), “Manas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be ballerinas.” There’s even a sinister music box Nina supposedly received years before as a present from her father (who otherwise isn’t mentioned at all during the film – I suppose we’re meant to assume that he’s dead), which features a toy ballerina dancing by clockwork to the opening of Act II of Swan Lake, the same strain Universal used as the theme music for two classic horror films, Dracula (1931) and The Mummy (1932). This music box also appeared in the recent Lifetime movie Hider in My House as a symbol of the way that film’s heroine was being tormented by the stranger secretly living in her apartment. Black Swan is the sort of frustrating movie you want to like better than you do, and it certainly has some haunting moments (including Aronofsky’s use of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, as arranged and cut-up by Matthew Dunkley and Clint Mansell; even the pop songs used in the film sample bits of Swan Lake, a marvelous touch), but overall it’s just “too much” in all the negative senses of that term.