Black Swan (2010)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
A committed dancer struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake."
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51 films that influenced Black Swan
What critics say influenced Black Swan
This eye-popping, inspired and often-demented (in a good way) cross between “The Red Shoes” and “All About Eve” channels horror maestros David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma and Dario Argento.
Darren Aronofsky's bizarre and brilliant Black Swan might remind you of many other movies, from All About Eve to David Cronenberg's The Fly.
It’s an all-or-nothing effort from the auteur, as reminiscent of The Red Shoes as it is of All About Eve and Mulholland Drive (not to mention the earlier works of Cronenberg, Argento and Polanski).
You can pick out all the references in this movie to other movies, not only "Red Shoes" and "Caligari," but also, for starters, "Phantom of the Opera," " All About Eve ," "Repulsion," and Aronofsky's own dreamy-druggy freak show " Requiem for a Dream ."
To put showbiz competition in All About Eve terms, every Margo Channing must have an Eve Harrington.
You turn it into a psychological thriller with the catfighting backstage elements of "All About Eve."
Aronofsky, taking a page from Roman Polanski's blood-chilling Repulsion (1965), signals Nina's fall with subtle cues and gradually pulls us over to the other side of the mirror.
Film buffs will think of many other movies while watching "Black Swan," including the dance masterpiece "The Red Shoes" (1948), Roman Polanski's mental-breakdown showpiece "Repulsion" (1965), Dario Argento's ballet-academy shocker "Suspiria" (1977) and "The Piano Teacher" (2001), with Isabelle Huppert as a sadomasochistic musician.
Much like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion, Portman’s primary job is to crack up on camera -- while always mustering a modicum of control.
However, by presenting the action from inside the fractured mind of the lead character, it has generated comparisons to some of Roman Polanski's early work (especially The Tenant and Repulsion).
Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning performance is central in this regard, just as Catherine Deneuve’s was in Repulsion, as she moves from being a near-child to a possibly murderous psychopath without ever losing our sympathy.
Among them: Roman Polanski's plunge into female hysteria, "Repulsion"; Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "All About Eve"; and Aronofsky's own performance drama, "The Wrestler."
Inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, The Red Shoes (which, in turn, was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fable), Black Swan focuses on shy and serious Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballet dancer with extraordinary technical ability, but little passion.
The Red Shoes and its theme of losing one’s self to a part is an obvious influence, but it’s another Powell and Pressburger film, Black Narcissus, with its sex-starved nuns, that hits closer to home.
Stark cinematography only emphasizes this to the point where it feels like Black Swan must be consciously attempting to counter the lurid but astounding palette of the original tragic ballerina film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes.
The mere prospect of a film that in many senses crosses Powell and Pressburger 's " The Red Shoes " with Roman Polanski 's " The Tenant " is certainly enough to raise an eyebrow, as the very notion screams potential camp classic in this day and age.
If Roman Polanski had made The Red Shoes (1948), the results might have been something like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
No backstage ballet story can be seen without " The Red Shoes " (1948) coming into mind.
As her bipolar mother, Barbara Hershey channels Piper Laurie in "Carrie," and Mila Kunis is the down-to-earth party girl upon whom Portman fixates.
Raised in a claustrophobic Upper West Side apartment by an overbearing, overprotective single mother (Barbara Hershey, channeling Piper Laurie from Carrie ) who was forced to give up her own ballet career after she got pregnant, the poor girl has been trained to focus on nothing but her dancing career.
Playing the demanding, controlling mother is something a lot of actresses have attempted and most have come off as a pale knock off of Piper Laurie in Carrie .
As with The Social Network , there have been comparisons to older works to prop up this new one, mainly Repulsion (1965) and Carrie (1976).
Hershey) that makes Piper Laurie from "Carrie" look like June Cleaver.
Erica’s peripheral yet essential role in Nina’s story gradually reveals Black Swan as less indebted to The Red Shoes than to Brian De Palma’s Carrie .
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Black Swan is vivid and engrossing, teetering between trash and art, a sleek exploitation borrowing from (among others) Fight Club and The Fly , Mulholland Drive and Persona .
It’s an all-or-nothing effort from the auteur, as reminiscent of The Red Shoes as it is of All About Eve and Mulholland Drive (not to mention the earlier works of Cronenberg, Argento and Polanski).
Aronofsky makes trashy what David Lynch made poignant in Mulholland Drive (one film’s girl-on-girl sex scene is a haunting expression of what a woman can never have, in the other it’s a lurid representation of the shameful things a woman has to do in order to succeed), though to be fair, Aronofsky isn’t going for poignancy here: All he wants is draaaama .
There’s a touch of Mulholland Drive in the film’s refusal to close all its circles, and this kind of storytelling is not for everyone.
Her chief rival is the brazenly sensual new kid in town, Lily, who struts into rehearsals like the female lead in a musical based on "Mulholland Drive."
At this point, Black Swan appears to be taking a detour down Mulholland Drive.
It's reminiscent of older, better movies: the late-'40s backstage dramas A Double Life (Ronald Colman plays Othello and becomes fatally jealous of his actress ex-wife) and the classic ballet melodrama The Red Shoes; and of films about tender, troubled psyches ?
The Red Shoes and its theme of losing one’s self to a part is an obvious influence, but it’s another Powell and Pressburger film, Black Narcissus, with its sex-starved nuns, that hits closer to home.
The sight of Portman dressed as the Black Swan and strutting imperiously across the stage evokes memories of Norma Desmond, the character Gloria Swanson played in Sunset Boulevard.
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On this evidence the French writer-director Eugène Green (small previous oeuvre unknown to me) may be the reincarnation of Robert Bresson, master of the gnomically poetic (Pickpocket, Mouchette).
The film has certain superficial resemblances to Herbert Ross’s ballet movie, The Turning Point , in that the heroine’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is an ex-dancer who gave up a career to raise a daughter in whom all her hopes are invested.
With this hallucinatory trip down a rabbit hole that is equally seductive and repellent, he makes a bid for a canon that includes no less than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("The Red Shoes") and Herbert Ross ("The Turning Point") in creating a ballet film that captures both the gossamer pink softness of classical dance and the scarier psychological impulses lying just beneath the serene surface.