In the world of dramatic logic according to most Hollywood films, cozy conservatism and a somewhat puritan desire for tidied messes prevail. It’s a different story in the inherently irrational and mythic worlds of opera and ballet. With Black Swan—possibly the greatest American film of the year—director Darren Aronofsky goes for the operatic card, messing with the heads of his disturbed protagonist and audience. It’s a potentially familiar tale of backstage intrigue and jealousy, a wicked stage mother, and a domineering director.
We follow the story of Nina (Natalie Portman, performing with an Oscar-worthy, razor’s-edge brilliance), a gifted but control-freakish ballet dancer, whose path to her debut as the star of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is fraught with mental unraveling.
But things go awry in the narrative, cross-shifting into unexpected psycho-sexual thriller directions along the way. And that’s when the filmic fun begins, along with basic questions like “Did that just happen?” or “Was that in our heroine’s addled imagination?”