On the surface, Black Swan is about a young ballet dancer called Nina (Natalie Portman), who gets the role of the white and the black swan in Tchaikovsky's famous Swan Lake. While she is entirely capable of dancing the innocent white swan, the dancing of the evil temptress that is the black swan is beyond her. In her search for perfection, Nina goes far, much too far.

While one would expect a ballet movie to be somewhat girly and preferably contain a love interest, Black Swan delivers those two elements not in the predictable, but in an uneasy and unstable way. Whereas the innocent Nina dwells in a room of pink furniture and is mothered on throughout the movie, she attempts to discover the repressed sexuality within her. Already, one of the most talked about scenes in the movie is the one in which Nina has a profound sexual experience with a fellow dancer (a woman), only to have that woman turn into herself. The movie is filled with that kind of double vision, and reflections of Nina are shown throughout, both in mirrors and doppelgängers. This is only one sign of the way her mind is breaking down, the audience's realization of which is compounded by the hand-held camera that follows Nina in a sometimes almost unbearably claustrophic manner. Nina's duality and the attempts of her sexuality and a kind of evil trying to gain the upper hand in her is enhanced even further by the lack of profound colour in Black Swan. The colour palate of the film is centered significantly around black and white, with touches of blood that appear when the boundaries between the two Nina's start dissolving. Although there are two or three important characters besides Nina, the film is essentially only about her and the struggle she goes through to be perfect. While the breaking down of her mind escalates, the genre of the movie changes from a kind of thriller-drama to downright horror, in which it becomes difficult to extricate the real from the imagined. While it is possible and even tempting to interpret this film as a critique of the harsh and impossible discipline imposed on ballet dancers and their bodies, it is obvious that the director's intention were, in the first place, to create a psychological thriller. In this, following a somewhat slow build-up, he succeeds masterfully, leaving one with a distinct feeling of unease after the grand finale, in which the dancing of Swan Lake is the apotheosis for both Nina and the audience. |