Nina develops her own built-in anti-Nina.Īnd it’s a highly partial airless view of ballet’s interior workings. Yes, “Black Swan” is the latest example of what the film critic Jeanine Basinger has called the “My god, there’s two of her!” device. Nina has a female nemesis, but that turns out to be less her sexy, confident frenemy Lily (Mila Kunis) than her own alter ego. Joan Crawford would have killed to play her. Nina’s loves are seen as repressed and illicit, her successes are shown as triumphs in an unnatural and injurious art form, and she is duly punished for these transgressions. Most powerfully it’s a modern example of that old genre, the woman’s movie. It’s a Tchaikovsky-soundtrack movie: Nothing about it is neater than the way Clint Mansell’s score is almost all taken from “Swan Lake” material, with a marvelous use of the slow chords prefacing the ballet’s most famous pas de deux for an offstage effect of psychological suspense. It’s psychosexual drama: Those forces come from her confused perceptions of her mother, her sexual inhibitions, her ambitions and her increasingly schizoid fantasies. It’s a backstager: Will poor hard-working Nina (Natalie Portman) get the white-black double lead role of “Swan Lake,” pull off its taxing demands, survive till the first night and vanquish her rival, not to mention her terrors? It’s horror: Nina’s life spirals out of control for alarming reasons apparently beyond her control and indeed her comprehension. So why has it so intrigued academy voters and the public alike? Surely because it exerts its lurid appeal on multiple levels. Few ballet films excite popular fascination, and almost none to the degree of “Black Swan.” This month, it’s up for five Oscars.
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