Ugly Duckling

[dotinthesky]

Black Swan is a good movie, but not great.

For one, the sort of dark imagination that Angela Carter was good at with fairy tales is missing from it. On that level, the fairy tale aspect (the film's biggest weakness, pointed out first by wink_martindale) would have sat better alongside the psychodrama, the end wouldn't have been so predictable and the heavy-handed symbolism wouldn't stick out.

The film needed a different type of style, more raw energy. If Lily was meant to embody the Black Swan alongside Nina's White Swan, she should have been more dangerous, duplicitous like Eve in All About Eve. She's instead a party girl who will take advantage of circumstances but who genuinely feels sympathetic towards Nina, if nothing else. There were some good hints that Lily was moving in for the kill, and it worked overall in the story, but it kept getting side-stepped by the film's obsession with grossing out the audience with Nina's feet and hands.

If the film wanted to pay homage to horror films from the 70s (which I agree with naturalbornkaos), it should have gone the whole hog and made "New York" a character in the story. I liked how the windows on subway trains were another mirror for Nina to stare into and get confused by other passengers. But I wanted more. She lived in her "little princess" bedroom - what was the rest of the city to her? What did the audience at Swan Lake's opening night mean to her? I spotted the references to Italian horror and Brian de Palma's Carrie and Dressed to Kill but didn't feel like the rawness of those original films made the transfer. Like someone else said, "the film wasn't bad enough".

The three women who stood as obstacles to white-clad Nina always wore black: the mother, the rival and the fallen diva. Thomas' office was black too, with a Rorschach painting on the wall. It was all a bit too easy to pick out. There was no tension behind Nina's drive to succeeded - you knew straight from the beginning that she would, the only question being who got hurt on her way.

I liked Nina's tense personality, though, and kept wanting the other characters to seduce her and break through. I didn't mind the titillation from Thomas or Lily's sex scenes with Nina. I don't think Nina was a repressed lesbian, so there's no controversy there - she was just someone starved of any sexual contact. I liked the way Nina stole Beth's lipstick and then got the Queen Swan part when Thomas kissed her and tasted "Beth" on her lips. It was the first sign that she would eventually transform into a "Beth" herself and become a master ballerina. I also liked the final performance, especially when she turns into the Black Swan - but, again, there could have been more!

Comments

[sor-eye-ah.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. it was 'nice' and 'a bit scary'. I'd never buy the Dvd. Am sad, it could have been so much more.

And for fucks sake, next time use an actual dancer who can do her own pirouettes. I don't care how well NP trained, she still didn't have the raw soul and energy of an actual dancer.

[amberholic.livejournal.com]

I must disagree with you about Lily. There's a distinction that needs to be made between the real Lily and the imagined Lily of Nina's hallucinations. The first is a carefree and fun-loving but friendly girl whilst the latter is a dangerous force of seduction. One is trying to sabotage Nina, whilst the other wants to help her.

I particularly liked the way Nina's transformation can be interpreted as her gradually descending into madness but also as her trying to be the perfect Swan Queen by living the role.

Finally, I always like the whole "play within a play" idea and it was executed quite well in this instance if you ask me, especially as we don't fully realise just how much it does until the very end. Thomas talks about stripping bare Swan Lake and making it more visceral at the beginning of the film and that's exactly what was achieved. Black Swan is a modern day interpretation of the story.

[naturalbornkaos.livejournal.com]

Good review. I really need to make a post about this...

[moveslikegiallo.livejournal.com]

I wanted to write about it, but I just hit a brick wall every time I try.

I found it an extremely painful film to watch, on all sorts of layers, but ultimately deeply unsatisfying and kind of hollow. I wish there'd been more to Nina than your standard issue uptight girl; I wish Lily had felt more like a real person (although in fairness she barely got any *real* screentime, I guess!). I wish they'd been less heavy-handed with their use of mirrors - I felt bludgeoned by the motif, rather than interested. I never felt like there was any ambiguity to anything - hey, look, Nina's in white again and Lily's in black! - and there was never any other possible ending to the story. Maybe that's partly because they stuck so closely to Swan Lake, but I never felt like there was anything at stake for Nina. What does she want at any point? What does she like? Does she enjoy anything? Is there ever any hope she might survive, or find any enjoyment in anything, or ... fuck, have a second of fun? She started off mentally unstable and ended up dead and was miserable the whole time without even a glimmer of hope. And that ... just wasn't affecting for me, or interesting.

Maybe that says more about me than the film, but I couldn't really feel anything during the finale because I never once doubted that things would end up that way, and even if she hadn't died, there wasn't anything brighter on her horizon anyway, so what's the point?

I think I feel like the film just portrayed her as a hysteric, with all the misogyny that term implies.

[sor-eye-ah.livejournal.com]

Final note, promise. Costumes were lame.