A Ballet of Madness

Darren Aronofski's 2010 psycho-sexual thriller Black Swan shocked audiences and was acclaimed by critics, and was subsequently nominated for five Academy Awards. The film is about the dark side of the ballet world, and centers around Nina, a young ballerina, who wins the lead in swan lake, and begins an inexorable fall into madness, jealousy paranoia and some great dancing.The film is stylized and bold, brash and loud, and is an imaginative insight into the world of ballet, an area i know relatively little about. Natalie Portman stars as the fragile, delicate Nina, protected and cosseted by her overbearing Mother (Portman won the Academy Award for best actress for her role) and Mila Kunis stars as Lily, her rival. Kunis' performance in the film was overlooked, and the actress failed to garner an Oscar nomination.

The film is a visual delight, with the picture being dramatic and thrilling. The film is very dark, and uses bleak cinematography and and very little color, in order to portray the impending doom. I would not usually comment on the production design i a film, except here, the film uses black and white a great deal, veering away from this in Nina's bedroom, infusing it with pink and warmth, and making it clear that this is a child's room, and inappropriate for a young woman of Nina's age. The film contains horror elements, such as Nina turning round to stare at herself in the mirror, and her leaning over the bath and looking at herself through the water, these are successful attempts by Aronofski to show us visually Nina's descent into madness, and to show us her demons in a visual graphic way, making the film visually suspenseful.

The film is in a sense a spiritual 'Film à Clef', which attempts to tell us the story of swan lake, and uses each of the characters as representations of characters in the story of Swan Lake, this is further instilled during the credits sequence, where the actors are each credited as playing two characters, their character in the film, and the spiritual role they inhabit. The two leads thus play the white swan and the black swan, each fighting for power, these two characters really exist inside Nina, as during many of the events in which Lily plays a part, we are unsure whether she is truly there, or if Nina is projecting onto Lily, her own darkness. The music in the film borrows heavily from Tchaikovsky's original score, (which explains the scores disqualification from the best original score category at that years Oscars) however with some notable exceptions, the club scene uses a piece of dance music by The Chemical Brothers, which is a reinvention of Swan Lake as a wild techno piece of club music.

Overall this film is a true tribute to Aronofski's skill as a director, like it or hate it Black Swan is bold, it is imaginative and it is fun without ever veering into camp. The film shows strong performances from its leads, and shows us a real insight into the world of the ballet, and the intense control and discipline that it requires. The director manages to give us a visually stunning film with a fun script that keeps us involved, and seems to run from twist to twist, never leaving the audience a pause in which to get bored Rating A

Nina: It's about a girl who gets turned into a swan and she needs love to break the spell, but her prince falls for the wrong girl so she kills herself.