Black Swan

I have seen four Darren Aronofsky movies counting this, but I have really only seen one. I don’t mean that literally, of course. But after seeing this, I am convinced he’s only capable of making one story: the tragedy of person succumbing to their moral failings. The Wrestler saw a washed-up, broken-down wrestler try to reignite faded glories. Requiem For A Dream saw a multitude of junkies descend into irreversible tailspins. The Whale charted an overweight shut-in’s final days as he gave up on life. Black Swan is, in essence, no different. The trappings are different, sure: it’s ballet, not wrestling or over-eating or drugs. She’s driven not by previous moral failings but her self-doubt and need to achieve a sense of artistic perfection. But the end result is the same; a spiral into sadness, madness, and tragedy. If you’ve seen any of the other movies I’ve mentioned, you’ve seen Black Swan. I spent the whole movie feeling like I was watching a rerun. Yes, the ballet scenes are shot well, and the arc the main character Nina takes is different from the other movies, but when the destination is the same every time, I can’t bring myself to care much about the journey, no matter how well acted or well shot it is. And then there’s the fact that Black Swan doesn’t communicate ballet to the non-fan whatsoever. I have never watched ballet (unless Bugs Bunny cartoons count). I don’t know good from bad. So when the movie tells me Nina (Natalie Portman) is precise but frigid, and Lily is imprecise but natural, I don’t understand. I don’t see it. The Wrestler did not need that familiarity with the medium in which the main character honed their craft. The viewer did not need to know what makes for a good match or bad. All a viewer needed to know was the main character was a man whose time had come and gone and he couldn’t accept it. Black Swan tells a reasonable story about an artist chasing perfection that may be out of their grasp, but when it can’t translate what the perfection looks like, it makes the movie somewhat impenetrable to anyone unfamiliar with ballet. And to add onto that, there’s the element Aronofsky adds with Nina’s deteriorating mental health and hallucinations. It’s fine enough, if overplayed and under-explained. But I’ve seen it before too, in Perfect Blue, where it was used to far greater effect. That used the hallucinations to play into the tonal dissonance being suffered by the main character. Here, Nina has no reason to be going insane and imagining the things she does. It just happens, and it only ends up making things confusing. It’s a shame because, for once, I actually thought Natalie Portman did a good job (I usually find her wooden and cold). I thought everyone did. But it was all in service of a movie that ate the leftovers of other, better movies. I’d rather just watch those other movies.