Black Swan – Movie Review
Now there was quite a buzz for this movie and I had to see it sooner or later. Sooner it was then. I had no big expectations to be honest and got into it really open minded.
The story is basically about this ballet dancer lady who is working like a maniac for that one big chance that would make her the star. The movie does an amazing job in showing how obsessed this young woman is in getting somewhere with her art. She’s full of doubt though. All that inner conflict is perfectly shown by the amazing acting performance of Natalie Portman. All the hard work pays off and she’s getting her breakthrough chance. That is when the ‘swan’ thing comes into play. In order to get her job done she has to play two characters in the show. The white and the black swan. These two characters demand so much expertise and training that slowly but surely the pressure on Natalie Portmans character adds up. Her mind starts to play tricks with her and the movie shows that nicely. It all comes together in the premiere of the show.
No doubt it’s a very special movie and I cannot name any other movie that is similar. Granted I’m no specialist in ballet movies. I had a few problems though. For a long time the movie has a very sexual oriented take which I thought was a little heavy. In order to play the black swan role in the show our main character has to let herself go. And I get the reference that sexual things kind of require that too. But I thought the emphasize on that theme was a little too much on that. Natalie Portman fans would surely disagree on that I guess. To balance that out they also integrated other things and methods of letting yourself go. That surely helped the movie and made it more believable. There are other things that can be interpreted differently by every individual so I will skip that. Another small thing I didn’t really like was the transformation of our character to be able to be/to play a black swan. That happened a bit too fast for my taste.
I do myself hard describing this movie since I think everyone will see it differently than I did. So all I can do here is to recommend this movie to everyone who wants to see a good movie. And it IS a good one. It is scary, it is interesting, it got great characters… it is a good one.
And by the way… biggest respect to all the ballet dancers out there. I would easily break all my bones even trying to attempt movements/dancing like they do. Especially these things are shot very very well in the movie. The camera in general is very good. It’s very natural and grounded work.
Check this movie out. It’s worth it.
7.9/10
Black Swan on IMDb
