Thank you Aranofsky for making Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis tongue each other.
Now I don't know about you, but this trend with Darren Aronofsky's films really worries me. With the exception of The Fountain, every single one of his main characters in every movie ends up going crazy. And Black Swan delivers that in full mind fuck bat shit crazy awesomeness.
So in Black Swan, Natalie Portman plays a ballerina who's out of her fucking mind. She get's cast to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan in a visceral adaptation of Swan Lake and with the help of her overbearing mother, her crazy instructor with wondering hands and her own paranoia over a new dancer that joins the company, she slowly finds herself slipping into insanity.
I ain't the biggest fan of ballet but this is one killer of a film. This is what you get when you put the raw and unflinching feel of The Wrestler and cross it with the cerebral horror and visceral mind fuck of Requiem For A Dream. This film is one creepy yet mesmerizing art movie.
I can't express how much credit I give to Natalie Portman. I never really cared when she was nominated for Closer but I can safely say she is going to get nominated for Best Actress and if there's nobody better, she should win. She trained her ass of for this role. I could tell. Anyone who has seen a ballet can tell. Just watching her disintegrate like that is such a pain to see and at the same time you can't take your eyes of her. The expressions on her face, the eyes, the movements of her lips and eyebrows, all these things don;t just come naturally for an actor playing such a difficult role. This demanded craft and huge amounts of control and Portman blew it out of the park.
And before I get to the other actors, I have one more thing to say that compliments Portman's performance and that was the camerawork of the film. The cinematography of Black Swan is kind of like watching ballet on LSD. We have Natalie Portman dancing and the camera is spinning around her, it's almost like she had a rig attached to her while she was dancing. And the camera never goes off her face. Matter of fact, it punches into it so tightly until we can see everything she's seeing and feeling. You're not watching Swan Lake when she dances, you are watching her literally disintegrating on stage in very uncomfortable close-ups.
The film's supporting cast is absolutely phenomenal. Vincent Cassel is great in this, Winona Ryder was great, amusing to cause I think Aronofsky deliberately cast her to have Natalie Portman steal her make up cause she used to shoplift muahahaha. Mila Kunis is great being Jackie Burkeheart in here. But the real good one here was Barbara Hershey who plays Natalie Portman's mom.
This woman is bat shit crazy. No wonder her daughter lost her fucking mind. She's that mother who's putting on tremendous amounts of pressure on her daughter while seemingly is trying to be the good guy. She's that character that was great in her prime but saw it all crumble when she had her daughter and is now in some form of competition with her and at the same time egging her on into this obsessive strive for perfection which ultimately leads to her downfall.
The sheer weight of this film is really overwhelming. It really is. Darren Aronofsky has succeeded in creating a nightmarish masterpiece that is going to leave people breathless. Be prepared to see this. It's going to take everything you've got.
RATING: 9/10
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