Portman has decisively moved out of the ugly duckling phase of her career with this tremendous performance as Nina, a hardworking corps member of a New York City ballet company who has low-level dieting and self-harm issues more or less under control. She lives with her difficult mother — an impressive and satisfyingly nasty performance from Barbara Hershey — who abandoned her own stagnant ballet career on being impregnated by some heartless, mercurial mogul or other, and channelled her rage and disappointment into coaching the resulting daughter, whom she has attempted to infantilise by filling her pink bedroom with gonks and installing a deplorable musical box that tinkles the theme from Swan Lake.
We join the story as the company is about to dispense with its bitter has-been star and wrecked gamine Beth Macintyre: The company's exacting director Thomas Leroy, played by Vincent Cassel, is looking for someone new to play the lead in Swan Lake. His hooded eye settles on tremulous Nina. But he warns her that the biggest challenge will be playing the character's evil twin, the "Black Swan". She has to find the darker, more sensual side of herself. Thomas invites Nina back to his apartment for intimate drinks. To develop the role, he instructs her to go home and touch herself.
Touching Thomas also appears to be on the agenda.
Get A Copy
But does Lily simply want to steal Nina's role? As a study of female breakdown, Black Swan is the best thing since Polanski's Repulsion. But, in fact, with its creepy Manhattan interiors, its looming, closeup camera movements, and its encircling conspiracy of evil, it looks more like Rosemary's Baby, particularly in cinematographer Matthew Libatique's brilliant continuous shot in which Nina makes out with a random guy in a club, then wakes up to what she's doing and, freaked out, blunders through murky winding corridors and out into the night air — there seems no difference between inside and outside.
Of course, any ballet movie has to be compared with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, and the figure of Thomas is obviously inspired by Anton Walbrook's legendary martinet — although Thomas is rather less high minded — and Nina's POV pirouette-whirl in rehearsal is also taken from Powell and Pressburger. But again, their influence might be more from the convent drama Black Narcissus, and the final confrontation of Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr.
This happens to be the second film recently that has used the Swan Lake theme — Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men featured it counterintuitively, at the crisis of an ascetic and spiritual tale of French monks. She's not as technically good as Natalie's character, but she has more passion, naturally. That's what [Nina] lacks.
He compared his character to George Balanchine , who co-founded New York City Ballet and was "a control freak, a true artist using sexuality to direct his dancers". Portman and Kunis started training six months before the start of filming in order to attain a body type and muscle tone more similar to those of professional dancers.
A few months closer to filming, she began choreography training. You wear a tutu and you stand on stage and you look cute and twirl. But this is very different because you can't fake it. You can't just stay in there and like pretend you know what you're doing. Your whole body has to be structured differently.
In addition to the soloist performances, members of the Pennsylvania Ballet were cast as the corps de ballet , backdrop for the main actors' performances. Aronofsky and Portman first discussed a ballet film in , after the release of Requiem for a Dream , though the script had not yet been written.
Navigation menu
The screenplay The Understudy was written by Andres Heinz; Aronofsky first heard about it while editing his second film Requiem for a Dream and described it as " All About Eve with a double, set in the off-Broadway world. In July , Kunis was cast. Principal photography was achieved using Super 16 mm cameras and began in New York City toward the end of I like Super 16 because the cameras are really light, really moveable. Also, for The Wrestler it was a money-saving thing.
The film stocks on 35mm would become so glossy that they'd get close to what people are doing on video. Like with wrestling, ballet is shot in wide shot with two shots on the side, and no one really brought the camera—well, wrestling—into the ring or for us, onto the stage and into the practice room.
I couldn't think of another example where they did that I was concerned if that would affect the suspense, but after a while I said, "screw it, let's go for it.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
In response to comparisons between Perfect Blue and Black Swan , Aronofsky acknowledged the similarities in , but denied that Black Swan was inspired by Perfect Blue. Amy Westcott is credited as the costume designer and received several award nominations.
- Fuentes del yo: La construcción de la identidad moderna (Spanish Edition).
- See a Problem?.
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?
A publicized controversy arose regarding the question of who had designed 40 ballet costumes for Portman and the dancers. An article in the British newspaper The Independent suggested those costumes had actually been created by Rodarte 's Kate and Laura Mulleavy. Furthermore, the corps ballet's costumes were designed by Zack Brown for the American Ballet Theatre , and slightly adapted by Westcott and her costume design department. We know that Natalie Portman studied ballet as a kid and had a year of intensive training for the film, but that doesn't add up to being a ballerina.
However, it seems that many people believe that Portman did her own dancing in Black Swan. The non-original music featured in Black Swan consists of music by Tchaikovsky featuring performances on-screen and in the soundtrack by violinist Tim Fain [43] and a track of electronica dance music by English production duo The Chemical Brothers.
It marks the fifth consecutive collaboration between Aronofsky and English composer Clint Mansell , who composed the original score for the film. Mansell attempted to score the film based on Tchaikovsky's ballet [44] but with radical changes to the music. The Chemical Brothers' music, which is featured prominently during the club scene in Black Swan , is omitted from the soundtrack album. Black Swan had its world premiere as the opening film at the 67th Venice Film Festival on September 1, It received a standing ovation whose length Variety said made it "one of the strongest Venice openers in recent memory".
Clooney is a wonderful actor, and he will always be welcome in Venice. But it was as simple as that. According to The Independent , the film was considered one of "the most highly anticipated" films of late The newspaper then compared it to the ballet film The Red Shoes in having "a nightmarish quality Black Swan had a limited release in select cities in North America on December 3, , in 18 theaters [60] and was a surprise box office success. The per location average was the second highest for the opening weekend of behind The King's Speech.
Black Swan () - IMDb
The website's critical consensus reads, "Bracingly intense, passionate, and wildly melodramatic, Black Swan glides on Darren Aronofsky's bold direction—and a bravura performance from Natalie Portman. In September , Entertainment Weekly reported that based on reviews from the film's screening at the Venice Film Festival, "[ Black Swan ] is already set to be one of the year's most love-it-or-hate-it movies.
Some found its theatricality maddening, but most declared themselves 'swept away'. Kurt Loder of Reason magazine called the film "wonderfully creepy", and wrote that "it's not entirely satisfying; but it's infused with the director's usual creative brio, and it has a great dark gleaming look. Goodridge described Portman's performance, "[She] is captivating as Nina Goodridge praised Libatique's cinematography with the dance scenes and the psychologically "unnerving" scenes: Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a mixed review.
He wrote, "[ Black Swan ] is an instant guilty pleasure, a gorgeously shot, visually complex film whose badness is what's so good about it. You might howl at the sheer audacity of mixing mental illness with the body-fatiguing, mind-numbing rigors of ballet, but its lurid imagery and a hellcat competition between two rival dancers is pretty irresistible. The critic said of the thematic mashup, "Aronofsky The film has been criticized for its portrayal of ballet and ballet dancers. Rojo called the film "lazy It doesn't show why ballet is so important to us — why we would want to try so hard.
Black Swan appeared on many critics' top ten lists of and is frequently considered to be one of the best films of the year. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with the swashbuckler film The Black Swan. Mike Medavoy Arnold W. Messer Brian Oliver Scott Franklin. Black Swan dance double controversy. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. List of accolades received by Black Swan. British Board of Film Classification. Retrieved September 21, Retrieved February 4, Retrieved September 10, Fox Movie Channel Originals. Retrieved February 11, Archived from the original on August 21, Archived from the original on August 30, Archived from the original on August 6, Retrieved August 6, Archived from the original on August 28, Archived from the original on August 4, Retrieved December 11, Retrieved December 23, Vincent Cassel Back for Eastern Promises 2 ".
Archived from the original on September 1, Archived from the original on August 22, The New York Times. Big Names in Black Swan ". Macfadden Performing Arts Media. Retrieved April 16, Retrieved January 29, Retrieved August 1, Montgomery Dances to Groove of Black Swan ". Archived from the original on December 14, Retrieved January 3, Ballet thriller Black Swan from Darren Aronofsky". Archived from the original on April 14, Retrieved September 18, Retrieved January 28, Retrieved January 30, The Wall Street Journal.
Retrieved March 30,