Film review: Black Swan

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky

Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis

On at: Cinema City Cotroceni, Cinema City Sun Plaza, Hollywood Multiplex, Movieplex Cinema, The Light Cinema

Few directors explore self-destruction as unflinchingly as Darren Aronofsky. Mickey Rourke’s excruciating sacrifice of health and happiness for last-chance-saloon glory in The Wrestler was a cakewalk alongside the misery the director heaped on his characters in Requiem for a Dream. So the denouement of Black Swan was unlikely to see a beaming Natalie Portman taking a triumphant curtain call as flowers rain down upon her.

Should you have missed the Oscars brouhaha, Portman plays a troubled New York ballerina on the verge of making the breakthrough to company star. Troubled is perhaps putting it mildly: Nina is a bulimic, schizophrenic self-harmer prone to hallucinations. But she is still in the running for the top role in Swan Lake. The company director Thomas (played by über-Frenchman Vincent Cassel, his face etched into a sneer of pure Gallic contempt) knows Nina’s beauty, control and fragility make her perfect for the White Swan part of the role. He urges her to find a sensual, dark side to give life to the wicked Black Swan, a part to which her vampish understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) seems far better suited.

Pressure from her controlling mother (Barbara Hershey), the bitchy ballet cadre, demanding Thomas and her own quest for perfection send Nina deeper into paranoia, and the film deeper into melodrama and absurdity. The dancer’s hallucinations at times seem drawn from a horror movie, as Aronofsky cranks up the theatricality and exaggeration. There’s also a hint of camp: Black Swan can be seen as the 1995 Paul Verhoeven trash-fest Showgirls given a tutu, ballet points and high-culture pretensions. It could also be accused of misogyny, with the female characters variously jealous, catty, sly, hysterical, promiscuous and frigid.

Aronofsky’s directorial singularity and excess ensure that though his films are not always enjoyable, they are at least unusual and intense. And Black Swan, for all its bizarreness, gives the impressive Portman a meaty role in which she convinces, both as actor and dancer. That visual panache wins out over credibility takes nothing away from her turn.