Ugly Duckling

[commonpeople1]

Black Swan is a good movie, but not great.

For one, the sort of dark imagination that Angela Carter was good at with fairy tales is missing from it. On that level, the fairy tale aspect (the film's biggest weakness, pointed out first by wink_martindale) would have sat better alongside the psychodrama, the end wouldn't have been so predictable and the heavy-handed symbolism wouldn't stick out.

The film needed a different type of style, more raw energy. If Lily was meant to embody the Black Swan alongside Nina's White Swan, she should have been more dangerous, duplicitous like Eve in All About Eve. She's instead a party girl who will take advantage of circumstances but who genuinely feels sympathetic towards Nina, if nothing else. There were some good hints that Lily was moving in for the kill, and it worked overall in the story, but it kept getting side-stepped by the film's obsession with grossing out the audience with Nina's feet and hands.

If the film wanted to pay homage to horror films from the 70s (which I agree with naturalbornkaos), it should have gone the whole hog and made "New York" a character in the story. I liked how the windows on subway trains were another mirror for Nina to stare into and get confused by other passengers. But I wanted more. She lived in her "little princess" bedroom - what was the rest of the city to her? What did the audience at Swan Lake's opening night mean to her? I spotted the references to Italian horror and Brian de Palma's Carrie and Dressed to Kill but didn't feel like the rawness of those original films made the transfer. Like someone else said, "the film wasn't bad enough".

The three women who stood as obstacles to white-clad Nina always wore black: the mother, the rival and the fallen diva. Thomas' office was black too, with a Rorschach painting on the wall. It was all a bit too easy to pick out. There was no tension behind Nina's drive to succeeded - you knew straight from the beginning that she would, the only question being who got hurt on her way.

I liked Nina's tense personality, though, and kept wanting the other characters to seduce her and break through. I didn't mind the titillation from Thomas or Lily's sex scenes with Nina. I don't think Nina was a repressed lesbian, so there's no controversy there - she was just someone starved of any sexual contact. I liked the way Nina stole Beth's lipstick and then got the Queen Swan part when Thomas kissed her and tasted "Beth" on her lips. It was the first sign that she would eventually transform into a "Beth" herself and become a master ballerina. I also liked the final performance, especially when she turns into the Black Swan - but, again, there could have been more!