If you know Mike Leigh's films, you can sense this is a story right for his world. If you don't, I wonder how it sounds. It's not a dreary psychodrama, it doesn't preach, it amuses and allows a few tears. The keys are the performances by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, and Sheen, I suspect, is the one the Academy will be drawn to.
Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, is a joining of ballet, madness and melodrama, and there are times when ballet itself seems to join the same qualities. How can you be a great dancer and not be a little mad? You have been drilled since childhood, every audition is a measure of your worth, and you are surrounded by people who feed off you and have power over you. There must be times when "break a leg" sounds like well-wishing.
Natalie Portman stars in a big and demanding role as Nina, a young ballerina up for the challenging double role as the White Swan and the Black Swan in "Swan Lake." Her New York ballet company is a hotbed of intrigue. It's ruled by the sadistic Thomas (Vincent Cassel), who apparently believes a thorough sexual experience with him should be part of any dancer's training. He has cruelly discarded a former lover and prima ballerina (Winona Ryder) to make room for Nina, while insulting Nina's technique: She is too technically good, too cold, to be the Black Swan, although her icy perfection is good for the White Swan.
Now comes a sexy competitor from the West coast, Lily (Mila Kunis), who seems born to play the Black Swan. Lily's insouciance plays like a rebuff to Nina's years of work. She is deviously, devilishly subversive. And Nina herself is coming apart; a fact clear to her controlling mother (Barbara Hershey), who has perhaps driven her mad with smothering love.
The movie is unafraid of flamboyance. If there is a hint of Aronofsky's previous film, "The Wrestler," in Lily's ability to perform while hurting, it contains more than a hint of the bold imagination of the film before that, "The Fountain" (2006). Although it's better than "The Fountain," it has the same willingness to go over the top, the ability to follow into fantasy or hallucination. Any dance movie invites comparison with the greatest of all,"The Red Shoes," and in its Svengali ballet master and its tortured heroine, "Black Swan" has the same heedless ambition.
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