Corpse de Ballet

Since my daughter has been doing ballet for almost a decade and she’s only 12, I feel I can talk about that demanding art form with some knowledge. Hell, I even did honours in dance myself, but then I preferred the pas de qwerty of writing.

So that’s where I’m coming from and the best I can say about the almost anorexic Natalie Portman in Black Swan is that she’s a very good actress and that she’ll probably get her Oscar, but - no matter what tricks of the cinematic trade director Darren Aronofsky employed, and they are varied and brilliant – she is not a prima ballerina.

This is a perennial problem with dance and sport films. You’re either starring as yourself in a medium that is not yours, or you are a good actor and portray a great dancer or athlete by proxy, though Chi Cao proves the exception in Australian director Bruce Beresford’s latest outing.

Mao’s Last Dancer (out on DVD for a while now) is a much finer film than the critics will have you believe, whether in its depiction of Li Cunxin’s journey from hinterland Chinese peasantry to Sydney, Australia, via Houston, Texas, or in its even-handed take on Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

Perhaps the critics wanted Chi to play a Westerner, not Chinese.

Anyway, the latter is a tale of survival, using the notion of beauty to guide its protagonist; Black Swan is a tale of being destroyed, almost willingly, by the notion to render that beauty perfect.

The idea of dying for, or being killed by, one’s art is a massive cliché, of course, and Aronofsky’s way of getting there is typically obsessive, repetitive and melodramatic.

There is once again the problematic mother, but this time she’s not high on speed and financial hope, as in the masterful Requiem for a Dream; this time she’s high on that bitter cul-de-sac of parental achievement by proxy.

Barbara Hershey plays the woman who gave up her career so that she could have her Nina, who could then succeed where she failed. That mama did so when her career was almost over is irrelevant to her; she made the sacrifice and now it’s payback time.

She is the true baby-boom witch in her black dress with her hair pulled back severely, showing us the Websterian skull beneath the ageing, pock-marked skin. Loosen her hair and she’s ever the gentle but strong, attractive woman again.

There is also the obsession with physical changes. If in Requiem it was the dilating pupils after ingesting narcotics and literally losing half an arm as a result of abusing them, then here it’s the bleeding feet of a ballerina, the loose skin around the fingernails chewed and ripped off to a bloody mess, not to mention the wings threatening to burst out of her scapulae – and then not together but alternately.

To say this film captures something would be to use completely the wrong cliché; it mirrors everything. There are mirrors all over the place because that is what ballerinas do endlessly: look at themselves - even the smudged, Perspex-like reflection of a subway train window will do.

If that look is critical, it does always run the risk of the kind of obsessive trait Aronofsky would pounce upon: narcissism.

One of the Swan Lake productions he alludes to is English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s version, which deals with male love, where the corps is all male and which is referenced at the end of Billy Elliot. But here Aronofsky turns it around and deals with that great male fantasy, lesbian desire, confirming every grunt’s perception that that is what all those girls, along with most female sportswomen, are.

Vincent Cassel plays the maestro who has been in the States long enough to have almost lost his accent Francaise and forces Nina to explore and confront her dark side, her Odile, without ever sleeping with her. He is straight and probably the most cliché-free character in the movie - and the dullest.

(Incidentally, it was heartening seeing Bruce Greenwood in a similar role finally getting a top credit as a character in Mao’s Last Dancer, instead of the Kennedy-handsome Washington bureaucrat he usually plays).

Nina, of course, loses her marbles for reasons that are not entirely clear. Maybe the thesis is that, in order to play Odette and Odile perfectly, as required, you have to become a schizophrenic. Maybe it’s because her nutty mother drove her that way.

But don’t expect Nina to look for a father figure in her maestro or anyone else – Aronofsky clearly has no experience of or faith in that line of enquiry. Maybe it threatens him to such an extent that by omitting it he thinks it strengthens his argument.

But what he manages to elicit from his leading lady is one of those shy, repressed people who will, if pushed, go beyond a happy ending, and his oddly grainy film perfectly "captures" the fraught, underlying hysteria that goes with an aesthetic that paradoxically transcends the normal female bodily functions.

Black Swan is an overly ambitious film that will mainly attract women - especially those who faithfully take their daughters to their ballet classes (the cinema I was in consisted mainly of women) - but then it does allow its director to executive-produce another Oscar-nominated film, one that deals with a much cruder art form: The Fighter.

Neil Sonnekus