American Dream

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Writer: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin

Star: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel

Plot summary:

Fantastically deranged at all times, Darren Aronofsky's ballet psycho-melodrama is a glittering, crackling, outrageously pickable scab of a film.

At its centre is young ballerina Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman. She is beautiful, vulnerable, sexually naive and susceptible to mental illness. To play the role of a lifetime, Nina must delve deep into her own dark side. As her hallucinations and anxiety attacks escalate in tandem with her progress in rehearsal, artistic breakthrough fuses with nervous breakdown. This is a movie about fear of penetration, fear of your body, fear of being supplanted in the affections of a powerful man, love of perfection, love of dance, and perhaps most importantly of all, passionate and overwhelming hatred of your mother.

From: "Black Swan - review" by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Movie review:

Darren Aronofsky has made another intense, disturbing, masterpiece about the American dream. It will get under your skin and linger. Be warned that some scenes are quite in your face (as you'd expect from the director of 'Requiem for a Dream'). The narrative is twisted and leads us down many darks paths, giving us lots to think about without getting bogged down with exposition, and the transformation - like something from a David Cronenberg body-horror film - shocks to the core. The interrelation of the central story with the swan lake story, which the ballet company are performing, parallel one another, forcing Natalie Portman's character in a downward spiral from sweet innocence to dark psychosis.

Themes of performance are centre stage and mirror that of Aronofsky's previous film 'The Wrestler'; showing the reality behind their performances. The years of training, the pain they endure, just to achieve "perfection". This is something which the director seems to come back to - how the american dream can spiral into a nightmare. He is the master of this, and aside from David Lynch's filmography, especially 'Mulholland Drive', is probably the only one creating such incredible visions. The cattiness, falseness, coldness of performing arts serve as subtext. Winona Ryder's washed-up, former star, showing the future that is in store for the youth of the company now. What really stands out is the destructive effects of performance though. The amount of pain they go through to give a good performance seems insane when you really think about it. Getting lost in a role, losing yourself and becoming someone new; this is what Black Swan is really about. A truth hard to swallow.

from: "Review: Black Swan" by Michael Henry in Michael Henry Film

Trailer: