Darren Aronofsky has done it again! The man whose dark genius brought us Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream has created a monster: a beautiful and twisted story of Kafka-esque transcendence that is haunting and seductive. Natalie Portman takes on the lead to play the role of Nina, an obsessive-compulsive ballet dancer whose quest for perfection leads her to paranoia, delusion, and deviance.
Nina’s complex fragility projects naïveté, innocence and dark desire. Portman’s childhood training in ballet and degree in psychology from Harvard likely came in handy for this role. Not only does she deliver a believable dramatic portrayal of her character and her sinister doppelgänger apparition, the black swan, but Portman also trained intensively in ballet for over a year prior to shooting in order to be able to do her own dancing in the film. Raw, riveting, and beautiful, Black Swan captures the beauty and the pain that lies at heart of the art of ballet.
