Ballet has been mourned as a dying art so often in recent years (even by its devotees?dark ash weeps from the sky at the demise of Jennifer Homans?s monumental dance history, Apollo?s Angels) that it?s a real boot when a movie comes along whose heroine believes that ballet is still an art worth passionately dying for. Or even killing for, should a drastic casting change be required. The history of film is feathered with ravishing ballerinas whose longing for transcendent flight sends them high-diving into borderline dementia, virgin brides for whom the stage is the sacrificial altar of Beauty. But none has gone as singularly ballistic as Natalie Portman?s Nina Sayers in Darren Aronofsky?s Black Swan, whose obsession to be the perfect Odette/Odile in Swan Lake is self-devouring. Aronofsky?s previous film was The Wrestler, where Mickey Rourke?s battered carcass was the meaty battlefield. The flesh is leaner here, but even more besieged. So militantly locked-on-target are Nina?s (and Portman?s) will and focus that the movie could be nicknamed ?Full Metal Tutu.? Or perhaps ?Full Mental Tutu,? since the tunnel through which Nina careens toward opening night is rigged with trick mirrors, paintings whose features leer and melt, and eerie doppelgangers?shock-cut snapshots from the prism of a mind going crackers. Portman?s Nina may look cool to the touch, her brow so alabaster and her devotion so Ivory pure, but she?s in a fever zone that has her breaking out in stigmata and optical flashes. With Black Swan, the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.
Although the film...makes a meal out of the dualities and polarities in the Tchaikovsky ballet?good and bad, salvation and damnation, noble renunciation and bedeviled seduction?black and white are not its primary colors. Pink and red are. Princess pink and demon red, to be precise. Pink is the infantilizing color of the dollhouse bedroom where Nina falls asleep to the music-box sounds of Swan Lake on her bedstand (the ringtone on her phone also tinkles the Swan Lake theme, which would drive anyone nuts), fussed over by her mother, played by Barbara Hershey, who?s a staple of the genre: the former dancer who never made it big and lives her thwarted dreams through her daughter, watching over her like a warden. So repressed and high-strung is Nina that the artistic director tells her snidely, ?Go home and touch yourself. Live a little.? Setting the bar a little low, aren?t we? But Nina, trained into obedience like so many bunheads, lies in bed and lets her fingers do the walking to her special place as her stuffed animals look on in mute nonjudgment, her lips parting as her breathing becomes breathier, until, aroused at last, she flips over onto her stomach, her firm bottom cat-arched, and when she turns her head?there?s Mom, dozing in a chair in her room! Poor girl can?t even diddle herself in peace. My guest for the Black Swan screening was a ballerina?one of the great Odette/Odiles of our time?whom I invited for her inside-ballet expertise. I glanced sideways at the climax of the scene to gauge her reaction: her jaw had fallen, agog. When that same pink bedroom becomes the site for a pas de deux of ballerina cunnilingus?not something you see every day on-screen?my date clutched my arm in rapt disbelief. I don?t think the movie quite tallied with her own Swan Lake preparatory experience.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/11/full-metal-tutu.html
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