The much hyped Black Swan is a film that can't decide what it wants to be. Part documentary of the tough life of a ballerina, part study in obsession and borderline insanity, part mom and daughter flick, part psychological thriller, part porn film, part movie version of Tchaikovsky's ballet, this effort is sadly less than the sum of its many parts.
Perhaps they should have injected some comedy into it. In the closing scene, Natalie Portman, playing the Swan Queen, leaps from a staircase to her doom. Actually, without wanting to give too much away, her doom has already been sealed, but since no one else in the theatre seems to notice that she's eviscerated herself, I guess we can gloss over that little problem.
No, what they should have done is to have replaced the mattress she does her back-flip onto with a trampoline. That way she could have come bouncing back up into view, complete with blood-stained tutu, just as happened at the end of a production of Tosca, when the absurdity of the thing got too much for the stagehands.
Perhaps they should have injected some comedy into it. In the closing scene, Natalie Portman, playing the Swan Queen, leaps from a staircase to her doom. Actually, without wanting to give too much away, her doom has already been sealed, but since no one else in the theatre seems to notice that she's eviscerated herself, I guess we can gloss over that little problem.
No, what they should have done is to have replaced the mattress she does her back-flip onto with a trampoline. That way she could have come bouncing back up into view, complete with blood-stained tutu, just as happened at the end of a production of Tosca, when the absurdity of the thing got too much for the stagehands.
Next up The King's Speech, in which Colin Firth seizes the opportunity afforded by the abdication of an elder brother with fascist sympathies to give up the good life playing Darcy in favour of playing a guy with a speech defect and finally snaring the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role .
6 comments:
I take it you saw it on a plane. Not in HK cinemas yet.
Nothing a USB and a tech-minded film buff daughter cannot fix.
While there's 87% approval rate from Rotten tomatoes, one of the less impressive critics from Los Angles Times sums up what I felt about the film: "Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as dueling ballerinas is not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not."
The LA Times is spot on. Pretentious claptrap. Once again, people are salivating over the fact that Portman spent a year practising ballet to prepare for the role, as if that means anything. We can feel her pain. Unfortunately, the viewer's pain is even greater.
When watching these "gritty realism", the-actors-must-go-through-rigorous-training-for-the role type films, I'm always reminded of Laurence Olivier's comment to Dustin Hoffman when he was depriving himself of sleep to get into character in Marathon Man. "Why don't you try acting?"
You omitted one part: cutting and self-harm.
How could I forget the self-mutilation? Maybe because so many other tricks were being played.
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