'Analyzing the Analyzer'
Film: Black Swan
Theme and director’s intention:
"A filmmaker who likes to play around with genre while mixing the highbrow with the lowdown and dirty, he has built a small, vivid catalog by exploring human extremes with wildly uneven degrees of visual wow, sensitivity and intelligence. He trawled the lower depths in “Requiem for a Dream” and struggled to scale the metaphysical heights with “The Fountain,” a fable about eternal (as in, when will it end?) love." - Dargis
"The movie is so damn out-there in every way that you can't help admiring Aronofsky for daring to be so very, very absurd." - Honeycutt
"The director here is the earnest Darren Aronofsky, and his trademark sledgehammer style makes any kind of enjoyment difficult." - Turan
Separate elements and their relationship to the whole
"It’s easy to read “Black Swan” as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web." - Dargis
"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." - Honeycutt
"This lack of subtlety in Nina's predicament means that, all the grueling physical work the actresses put in to make the dancing convincing notwithstanding, there is nowhere of sustained interest for their characters to go. But expecting subtlety from a Darren Aronofsky film is like expecting Pixar to announce a slasher movie. Not in this lifetime." - Turan
Objective evaluation of the film
"A witchy brew of madness and cunning, “Black Swan” tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to break out of the corps." - Dargis
"A New York ballet company's artistic director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel, the only unambiguous character in the film), selects Nina for the double role of the White Swan and Black Swan in his provocative new take on that old war horse "Swan Lake." He knows Nina can nail the White Swan, but he's not so sure she can embody the dark side of the Swan Queen. So he imports from the West Coast another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), whose cunning, deviousness and rampant Id make her an ideal Black Swan. Lily becomes Nina's alternate for the Swan Queen -- and her rival." - Honeycutt
"As presented in the screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andrew Heinz and John McLaughlin, Nina is supposed to be a Goody Two Shoes, a virginal drone who's devoted her life to dance and labored for years in the corps de ballet without a peep of protest." - Turan
Subjective evaluation of the film
"Part tortured-artist drama, “Black Swan” looks like a tony art-house entertainment. But what gives it a jolt is its giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation-cinema savvy." - Dargis
"The movie combines horror-movie tropes with The Red Shoes, All About Eve and every movie about show business that insists you don't have to be crazy to become a star but it doesn't hurt either." - Honeycutt
"This tale of feathered ambition starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as dueling ballerinas is not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not." - Turan
The film’s level of ambition
"With “Black Swan” Mr. Aronofsky has found a surprisingly accommodating vehicle for his preoccupations, including bodies in pain, and his ever more refined technique." - Dargis
"The film takes its cues from "Swan Lake" itself as demons, doubles and death dance in Nina's head. She can only approach perfection by becoming the dual character she plays -- the innocent and the evil." - Honeycutt
"The idea behind "Black Swan," in as much as it has an idea beyond the presentation of sensation, is that the quest for perfection can unhinge the unwary. It's a plausible notion, but the problem is that Aronofsky in his deterministic zeal can't help but stack that deck." - Turan
Words you found interesting.
Phantasmagoric - Dargis
Bravura - Honeycutt
Bludgeoning - Turan
Relationship to film movements/genres/ relation to other filmmakers’ work.
"The director Darren Aronofsky is a well-schooled cinéaste, and in “Black Swan” he riffs on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” and the pair’s “Black Narcissus,” among other influences." - Dargis
"Swan bears a resemblance to Aronofsky's most recent film, The Wrestler. Its battered, lonely protagonist was a pro wrestler who drags his weary body into the ring night after night because that's what he is -- a wrestler. Same with Natalie Portman's Nina, a sinewy, thin slip of a ballerina whose body actually cracks loudly while getting out of bed. But she heads into the dance studio every day to pirouette on bloody toes and strain every muscle in her body." - Honeycutt
As he showed in "The Wrestler" and earlier, this is someone who believes in bludgeoning audiences into submission. - Turan
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Dargis, Manohla. "On Point, On Top, In Pain" rev. of Black Swan, dir. Darren Aronofsky. Refn. The New York Times 2nd, Dec. 2010
Honeycutt, Kirk. "Black Swan -- Review" rev. of Black Swan, dir. Darrn Aronofsky. Refn. The Hollywood Reporter 14th, Oct. 2010
Turan, Kenneth. "Movie Review: Black Swan" rev. of Black Swan, dir. Darrn Aronofsky. Refn. Los Angeles Times 3rd, Dec. 2010
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