Film Review: Black Swan (2010)

Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder
Written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin (screenplay), Andres Heinz (story)

Warning: contains spoilers!

Recently I have found myself sucked in to a lot of the hype surrounding upcoming releases, with Darren Aronofsky’s highly anticipated psychological thriller Black Swan a prime example. I was expecting to be completely blown away, my eyes transfixed from beginning to end. In reality it fell extremely short of this.

Portman’s performance has been generating Oscar buzz for quite some time, especially since her role demanded an enormous physical transformation and extensive, gruelling training. Nina is pure, innocent and, contrary to what she claims to be, seemingly virginal, obviously the complete opposite to Kunis’ Lily, who is extroverted, free spirited, sinful and quite frankly, the only character I enjoyed watching.

For me, one of the film’s biggest setbacks was the lack of character development. I found Aronofsky focused far too much on stylistics and not enough on the characters that we are supposed to care about. From the minute Nina appeared on screen, I had no connection to her whatsoever. There was nothing revealed about her background, apart from the fact that dancing is her life and she lives with an incredibly controlling mother. That just didn’t cut it for me. In order to enjoy a film, I really need to be able to connect with or relate to the characters to some degree and there was nothing that drew me to Nina.

Black Swan was essentially about how Nina slowly descends into madness, however I never found her to be completely sane. When we meet her, she is a softly spoken loner, who isolates herself from her peers, mainly due to her social awkwardness and her (quietly) competitive nature. Nina is battling to stay sane, however her constant and never ending strive for perfection is what hinders and actually worsening her chances of maintaining (or returning to) sanity.

We discover that lots of Nina’s reality is in fact hallucinations, which leaves the audience wondering what else was conjured up in her head and what really happened.

I almost thought that Aronofsky was going to pull a Sixth Sense on us and reveal that Lily is just a figment of Nina’s imagination, but the ending he presented was even more lackluster than a copycat of a previous film. I am not one of those people that needs everything spelled out for me, however I don’t like feeling cheated. I thought it was too easy to just end the film where it did and I left feeling extremely underwhelmed.

Aronofsky effectively presents a dichotomised world through his use of colour; Nina’s purity and innocence is represented by her wearing white and soft pinks, whereas the temptress Lily is almost always wearing black. We see these worlds combine in both Thomas’ office and home, although it all gets to be a bit too much. Halfway through the film I found myself thinking, “okay, I get it, white is innocence and black is impure.” And while there are undoubtedly beautiful sequences throughout Black Swan, however this just wasn’t enough. Too much to look at and not enough substance.

★★☆