BLACK SWAN

Nina Sayers is a ballerina at the New York City Ballet. Obsessively dedicated to classical dance, shaped by a possessive mother who failed to achieve her dream of becoming a ballerina, Nina sees the opportunity for success. The choreographer Thomas Leroy, in fact, wants to open the season with his own variation of "Swan Lake" and entrusts Nina with the double role of protagonist and antagonist; the girl will have to play both the ethereal white swan and her evil twin, the black swan. If the white swan comes naturally to Nina, the same is not true for the evil counterpart, so the ballerina begins a total training that leads her to confuse reality and nightmare. The plot of "Swan Lake", the famous ballet composed by Tchaikovsky, is quite well-known. A prince meets and falls in love with a girl victim of a spell that turns her into a swan during the day. Only a promise of marriage on her deathbed can free the woman from the enchantment. The prince decides to announce his marriage with the swan-girl during a ball, but the sorcerer who cast the spell appears at the ceremony bringing with him his evil daughter, the twin of the swan-girl. The prince, deceived, asks for the hand of the evil twin and what follows is tragedy. "Swan Lake" is the trigger and narrative corpus of "Black Swan". Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin have the excellent intuition to transform Tchaikovsky's work into a diegetic and at the same time extradiegetic element: "Swan Lake" is inside "Black Swan" and "Black Swan" takes inspiration from it, feeds on it, and finally transforms into it. And the narrative metamorphosis that leads to the superimposition of the ballet's plot with the film's story is parallel to the psychic and physical metamorphosis that affects the protagonist of this magnificent horror of the soul. Nina Sayers, played by an excellent Natalie Portman (winner of a Golden Globe and in line for a well-deserved Oscar), is a frustrated, weak, submissive, and frigid girl. Dominated by a mother who instilled in her the passion for dance as the fulfillment of an unachieved dream, Nina shows passivity towards any event, ready to turn the other cheek to any offense, shy, and modest. Her encounter-confrontation with the choreographer Leroy, played by the always good Vincent Cassel, and her acquaintance with the uninhibited rival Lily (a fascinating Mila Kunis) open up a world to her where modesty and submissiveness must necessarily break. For Nina, this means growth, physical and mental, hence freeing herself from the stuffed animals that adorn her room, loosening the ties with her mother, growth in competitiveness, and above all discovery of her body and the sexual sphere. On Leroy's precise advice, the girl explores the sexuality she has repressed until that moment, releases herself by masturbating (but the watchful shadow of the oppressive mother initially hinders the practice in an intense and memorable scene), dedicating herself to one-night stands with strangers, and above all dreaming of incredible sapphic scenes with the friend/rival. Nina is disturbed from the beginning of the film, but the request to embody the black swan, which, unlike the white swan, is very far from her manifest personality, induces her to a hallucinatory transformation that overturns all the taboos of the girl. Nina discovers and makes the audience discover her dormant side, and in a crescendo of truly unsettling nightmare scenes, becomes her character. The physical transformation, anticipated by a skin irritation on her back, perhaps self-inflicted, which seems like a premonition of the sprouting of a wing, is painful and disturbing and fits well with the harsh world of classical dance. The nails break, the bones crack and settle, the flesh tears, blood gushes from non-existent wounds, the skin rises and gradually shows the advancement of a black fur of feathers and quills. The metamorphosis is total and complete: the transposition becomes the transposed, the interpreter the character. The work done on "Black Swan" is commendable in every component, from the perfect screenplay to the intense and participatory acting, about which we also mention the small but significant role of a rediscovered Winona Ryder. The music is naturally that of the ballet, enveloping and absolutely irreplaceable in a film like this: "The Dying Swan" will echo for hours in the viewer's head after the viewing. The only criticism that can be made is towards the direction of Darren Aronofsky, beloved and awarded director of "Requiem for a Dream" and "The Wrestler". On the one hand, we have a majestic fluidity in handling the many dance scenes and an unimaginable macabre and visionary in the horror scenes, on the other hand, it is not understandable the insistence with which the director reproposes the following with a handheld and shaky camera already characteristic of "The Wrestler". In the film with Mickey Rourke, although this technique was abused, there was a symbolic reason for its use, in "Black Swan" however, the same strong motivation is not captured, and I don't like to think that it is again a visual metaphor of the desire to "be in the spotlight," in everyday life as well as in professional life. Aronofsky aside, "Black Swan" is a film that fully convinces, a beautiful and poignant parable about loneliness, desire, and madness. Add half a pumpkin to the final vote.