NATALIE PORTMAN IN BLACK SWAN

Dancing with doppelgängers

Darren Aronofsky has never done anything by halves as a director. So now he has turned to ballet, and made a beautiful, absurdly lurid bad dream of a movie that ramps up all the clichés of the tormented dancer. There's the masochism, the paranoid competitiveness, the frustrated stage mother, the cruel, exploitative ballet master, the jealous underlings, the anorexia, the former star (Winona Rider!) who's plowed under to make way for the new one, and the triumphant debut that destroys its protagonist.

As if all this were not enough, in Black Swan Aronofsky robs his lead of any ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, provides her with an excess of doppelgängers (at least three of them), and makes her involvement in the narrative of a particular ballet, Swan Lake, so deep and unbalanced that it effaces her already wobbly sense of self. Anybody's saner instincts are so ruthlessly violated by all this that the first two thirds of the movie are an agony to watch. And yet so great is Aronofsky's conviction, foolhardy boldness, and desire to shine, so skillful is his use of the throbbing strains of Tchaikovsky, so ugly-beautiful are the jerky hand-held images he splices together to tell his giddy story, so intense is the dedication of his star/victim, Natalie Portman (as the insecure prima ballerina, Nina Sayers), so slick and confident is Vincent Cassel as the macho director of the company, so glittering are the dance performance sequences, that the finale feels breathtaking, and you wish you could forget all the violations of taste and logic that lead up to it. Black Swan is some kind of kitsch masterpiece. It feeds off half a dozen better films, and blends in several dozen worse ones, and the result is, in spite of you, a pretty intense watch.

Insofar as you can watch. There is a strain of self abuse (in both senses) that's repulsive, nauseating, and redundant. Nina used to scratch herself. She still does, actually. Thomas Leroy (Cassel) is staging a season of ballet "classics" in bold new reimaginings; the exteriors make this Lincoln Center. His new Swan Lake, he ominously announces, will be more "visceral and real" than the standard one. (The horror movie clichés spin out from that hoary idea of a fiction that gets too real.) He's considering Nina for the starring role. The ballet requires the lead to dance two parts, the White Swan and the Black Swan. The prince falls for the White Swan, but then falls for the black one, not knowing she's different. This leads the White Swan to suicide. Leroy constantly goads Nina, saying she's too prim, too contained, too "perfect." She's fine for the role of the White Swan, he says, but when it comes to the wilder, freer, more dangerous Black Swan, she hasn't got what it takes.

Black Swan owes an obvious debt to the nightmare vision of Dario Argento. His 1977 Suspiria is about a young American dancer who comes to a European ballet company, and only later learns that it's only a cover for something much more sinister -- the staff of the school are actually a coven of witches bent on chaos and destruction. Well, Nina is a coven of witches unto herself. She's working on her own destruction. She scratches her back till it shows red welts. She dances till her toe bleeds. She pulls at her fingernails and they bleed. She imagines dangers and threats that aren't there. She has no life outside of dancing, won't even take a drink or eat a piece of cake, may be a virgin, and seems to have a feeble hold on reality. This is a prima ballerina? Only in a horror movie, or an overwrought psycho-thriller with a horror-movie heart. In real life the job calls for talent, discipline, and hard work. But Aronofsky's topic isn't self-discipline, it's self-destruction. The ballet is just window dressing.

Nina's competition comes in the form of Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer who arrives from San Francisco and whom Leroy likes. She has a dark beauty and a natural, relaxed manner that suggest she has the Black Swan qualities Leroy keeps saying Nina lacks. But does she exist? Or is she Nina's dark side? Or is she really Nina's healthier side? She's two-sided, anyway, half the time being friendly and supportive and half the time a predatory trickster ready to step in and grab the lead role away from Nina. Leroy makes her the back-up dancer, though Nina begs him to pick somebody else.

Lily may not exist. It's easy enough to assume Leroy doesn't exist either: his lines are so often laughable. And vulgar. Never has the F-word been used so often in a ballet movie. The crude talk takes this down a peg from its pretension of being about dedicated art. The hetero sex is crude backroom near-rape. Leroy commands Nina to go home and masturbate --- "live a little." She complies, but is cut short with a jolt when she sees, or imagines, her mother sitting in a chair watching. There is also a drug-taking scene, a red-and-blue psychedelic dance-club scene, and, for good measure, a lesbian sex scene. These offer titillation -- and a little variety. The movie harps on its shticks so much it's mostly repetition. It also undercuts its climax, which is a shocker till you think about it and wonder if it too might not just be Nina's fantasy. Maybe she didn't make it to the theater that night and is in her Upper West Side apartment with her mother. Unfortunately Black Swan provides no baseline reality to set off the delusions.

The film jumps, repetitively, and with a purposely dreamlike suddenness, between its few locations -- from dressing room to practice floor to subway to the cozy yet cloying apartment Nina shares with her passive-aggressive former dancer mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), an aging double whose support, as is standard for the stage mother, ultimately only undermines Nina's confidence, which seems nonexistent anyway. One of the primary flaws of this unreal story is the way it fails to establish Nina's credentials as a dancer, her history, her success among rivals. Part of the problem is the uneasy situation of using an amateur dancer (Portman) to play a professional one, even performing her dances. Portman is totally committed, but we can only guess what kind of movie this might have been if the dancing had been better served in the staging and the cinematography and the dancers had had something more in common with members of actual ballet companies instead of being pure figments of Aronofsky's fevered imagination.

Black Swan has thrills, intensity, the dedication of its star. It has a fanatical devotion to its excessive, overwrought, repetitive, clichéd themes. Because of those elements, part of the time, it works. But it also repels, and I laughed out loud a lot, and I wasn't supposed to. Aronofsky is manipulative and abusive toward his characters (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, now this). Especially in this rather weak year, this movie is a must-see. But it distorts and cheapens both classical ballet itself and the world of ballet dancing, and that's a big price to pay for some shock and awe.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.