Black Swan

Natalie Portman looks like a ballerina. Waif-like, delicate and fragile, she’s physically perfect to play the role of Nina Sayers – a dancer cast as the lead in Swan Lake. With a supporting cast including Barbara Hershey and Vincent Cassel, surely Black Swan couldn’t fail to impress...

Portman’s Nina is beautiful yet naive – a perfect fit for the innocent side of the dual role of Swan Queen. Problematically she lacks the fire, unpredictability and sexuality required to play the character’s titular alter-ego. Nina s a dream role for an actress – it requires a portrayal of great physicality, enormous skill and some real acting chops. And Portman doesn’t disappoint. She’s absolutely fantastic throughout.

Her performance hinges on her being believably unhinged as the intensity of the role, her repressed home life and her sexual awakening combine, culminating in a nervous breakdown of sorts. As the pressure grows on her to embrace the darker side of her personality so her anxieties increase, manifesting themselves in hallucinations, self-harm and an increasingly fractured personality – personifying itself in the form of fellow dancer Lily (Mila Kunis).

Sadly Nina is the only character in the film who’s not a one-dimensional stereotype. Cassel’s rapacious director is crudely drawn and delivers some truly awful dialogue, Winona Ryder’s washed up ballet star is little more than a plot device and Hershey chews up the scenery as Nina’s wicked mother. Perhaps these gaudy caricatures are designed deliberately but they are too creakily created to be convincing.

All the clichés you would associate with mental breakdown are present and correct: overbearing mother, druggy nightclub scene, a freaky music box, lashings of blood, lesbian sex, doppelgangers, hallucinations, gallery of portraits with eyes which follow you around the room, etc, etc. Subtle it is not.

The film looks amazing, though. A palate of blacks, whites and greens is decorated with sparing splashes of colour – particularly the crimson of blood and slashes of lipstick. Mirrors are a recurring theme – rarely has a character spent so long staring at their own reflection. Very early in the film we see Nina metaphorically cut in two by a long mirror and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that mirrors will be involved in the film’s denouement.

Ultimately it’s a film saved by a committed performance from Portman, some excellent cinematography and a neat eye for detail. But it’s preposterously over the top, very predictable and a little unstable. Thankfully it doesn’t take itself too seriously and as such it’s entertaining - if unfulfilling.