This is possibly my only real criticism of the movie. What ballet was shown looked good enough, but there wasn’t enough really shown to get a good idea of what was going on or what degree of talent she had. A better eye than mine could probably determine what she did well or not as compared to a professional ballerina, but from what I saw any reasonable actress could have done those ballet scenes (not to take away from Portman’s performance at all though – I thought she was wonderful (though I DID like Kunis better!))
By the by: did anyone else find that the scene where all the ballerinas were ‘preparing’ their shoes near the beginning of the film was almost exactly the same as a scene in the teen ballet flick “Center Stage” (which is my pick for the best ballet movie of the modern era,that or “The Company”).
The primary symbolism of The Black Swan is the same as the ballet it portrays, Swan Lake. The female prima donna fails at her sexual awakening and destroys herself as a result.
I thought Kunis played a more enjoyable character, but it was a much easier role. She is a wonderful actress, but easy going and fun loving is a role Kunis has done many times well. Meg Griffin aside, or course.
I haven’t seen Center Stage and the closest I’ve ever been to ballet or ballet dancers is watching The Turning Point back in 1977 when it was released, La Danse (in an effort to be a little prepared for Black Swan, but it was very unhelpful), and Black Swan, so I was completely clueless about what was going on with the shoes. I know there’s a block of wood in the shoes, but they buy a pair to tear them up? What’s with the tearing up? Please tell me what’s going on with the shoes.
I read 'Dancing on my Grave" by Kelsey Kirkland she wrire about the prepareing the dancing shoes. Looks pretty much how she describes it in the book. Need a professional opinion I believe.
I saw this last night with a friend, and she thought it was one of the most laughably bad movies she’s ever seen.
I pretty much hated it, too.
After the movie we tried to figure out why the movie is so well liked (88% critics, 91% audience on Rotten Tomatoes) and why we so didn’t like it. We’re both in our early 50s and have seen many movies, and we’re both English professors and teach writing and story development, and we thought the story was terrible.
Well kapri, you know, we can’t all like everything. I feel almost the same way about The Kids Are All Right. I did like Black Swan quite a bit though, and I’m not into ballet at all. I like psychological movies, so I like this for the same reasons I liked Shutter Island. Odd that no one is blasting Black Swan for its ending, the way some people blast Shutter Island.
That’s interesting, thanks. I know I’ll be seeing the movie again, so I’ll understand a bit better.
I can imagine the need to constantly buy new ballet shoes gets expensive very quickly, but then I read on the Pointe shoes Wikipedia page that:
Black Swan is doing very well. It’s still in somewhat limited release, though it’s opened wider every weekend, and it’s made $22,431,000 on a $13 million budget. It hasn’t opened overseas at all yet. It’s getting awards nominations (and several wins, especially for Natalie) all over the place (that link is woefully incomplete). It’s set to get a boatload of Academy Award nominations, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Natalie takes home the Best Actress Oscar.
I understand that many people liked Black Swan, and that’s fine. Because my friend and I hated it and because we are apparently in the minority, we are mystified and befuddled. The symbolism and metaphor were so in-your-face and continual that we actually laughed out loud a few times. It was like Aronofsky was trying to make the same point over and over and over and over, as if he thought the audience wouldn’t get the one-note plot unless he hit you over the head with it repeatedly.
Oh, it was bad.
(As for Shutter Island–I thought that was much, much better than Black Swan. At least there was an air of mystery/suspense about it.)
But other than that count me in the group that was underwhelmed.
I see more of a dancing world riff on the 2002 movie Spider - experiencing psychosis (that has a tragic result) from the POV of the psychotic individual - than anything else, and not as suspenseful of a version of it.
I guess I might have enjoyed it more if I felt that it was at least a good portrayal of a known mental illness, but it wasn’t even that.
Portman was very good but even with her performance the character still seemed to have not much depth. Obsessed with perfection and yet none of the drive and agency that goes with obsession.
That’s what I get for having looked forward to a movie.
So the moral to the story is, if you seek perfection in your art and you have an over-protective mother, you’ll stab yourself in the stomach with a shard of glass? And a shard of glass in your stomach will make you dance better.
All righty then.
It did make me want to revisit “Perfect Blue” again soon.
By the by, whose face was that suppose to be when it wasn’t Natalie Portman or Mila Kunis or Winona Ryder?
Just finished watching an Oscar screener and really enjoyed the flick, despite having a HUGE sense of deja vu. Yes, I was annoyed that the ending was so much like The Wrestler but couldn’t help feel like Aronofsky was mirroring Polanski’s Repulsion, except with a whole ballet theme.
The whole sexually-repressed beauty, trying to find her own way with some interesting special effects was salvaged by Natalie Portman’s acting. The story was a retread and nothing new.
Saw this movie the other night and I enjoyed it. Part of me wants to see it again, knowing the ending, but part of me isn’t sure I could sit through it again–at least not yet. Does that make sense?
Ditto. Visually, it’s arresting - the scene where Portman finally plays the Black Swan on stage for the first time is as captivating a visual as you’ll see on film this year.
But the plot is really just “Tales of the World’s Most Emo Ballerina.” She’s a cutter with confused sexuality and an overbearing mother who finds perfection in death. My God, if she weren’t so immersed in the world of ballet, she’d probably have bangs covering her eyes and listen to Simple Plan all the time, too.
Plus, there were parts where I was on the verge of laughing - the scene where she (at least in her head) drags away Lily’s dead body felt like it belonged in one of Guy Ritchie’s gangster comedies. It just got way too near campy for my tastes, and it was just one melodramatic scene after another.
Also, I hate Hate HATE body horror, so that made it hard to watch.
I actually loved The Wrestler because unlike Aronofsky’s other movies, it’s so, SO grounded in reality. It’s dirty and unflinchingly real. When his movies go all psychological (like Black Swan and Pi) I always find myself saying “What’s all the fuss about?”
A bit of an aside… when real people have hallucinations from psychiatric illness they are very rarely visual and almost always auditory in nature. Yet movies, being a visual medium, often go with visual aspects to the hallucinations. I grant them this artistic freedom and acknowledge that it is very difficult to have an audience share in a psychotic character’s delusions, and especially to accept them as being reality, without having the audience experience something that gives the false belief. But is there another way to get the audience to share in the character’s delusions without creating these visual hallucinations that I can’t think of? Have any of you seen a movie that pulled that off?
Do not know how to do a spoiler box, so if you haven’t seen it, don’t read the next section:
While I was watching, I kinda got the vibe that her mother was sexually abusing her. There are all those scenes where her mother was helping her get undressed and grooming her, and in the sex scene with Mila, her mother’s face suddenly appears. It explains some of Natalie’s fanatic behavior, particularly the scratching. (I read it’s common for sexual abuse victims to try to disfigure themselves as a subconscious way of repelling their abuser.)
That seemed that that was where the movie was leading right until the end. I thought with the impetus of Natalie getting the lead role, her mother (a failed ballerina) was sabotaging Natalie, because once Natalie became a star, she did not need mother anymore. She could have even been drugging Natalie. But judging by the ending, that theory doesn’t seem to be the case, though the codependency between them does raise some questions about what drove Natalie insane.
Or maybe I just wanted to predict something that was not the new cliche “She’s crazy” ending.