First of all, why is there no ballet in a ballet movie? For example, I have never been interested in this art form, and I would not say that it is interesting to me, but within the framework of the film it would be possible to arrange a small educational program for the audience, or at least to show a real ballet. After all, in the center of the plot is a non-trivial interpretation of “Swan Lake”? Well, show her to us. Even so that ballet-haters like me realize that she's not trivial. But no. Instead of the secrets of the ballet – “scandals, intrigues, investigations” in the spirit of NTV. What should the viewer understand? What can any cow become if you sleep with a director? Is that what the director thinks the art is about?
Again, there is no ballet in the film. There is a clumsy extra on the background and close-ups of the main character in such angles that you can see either the face and shoulders, or legs (for the understudy). All this is shown in fragments and generally takes up a tiny fraction of screen time. The camera is also pointlessly rushing, not even allowing you to trace the movement of the heroine on the stage. I wonder if the producer didn't have the money to hire a real ballet company to shoot? In general, what is happening on the stage looks like amateur activities of the district level.
Another interesting thing is that there is almost no street in the film. Just the square in front of the theater. And a few seconds in front of the nightclub. And when the heroine goes home from the theater or to the hospital, she seems to teleport. Again banal economy, disguised as the original director's find?
The main character makes you wonder how she is still on stage. The art of ballerina is, first of all, physical training. Because if the body is not able to move as it should, nothing can save it. And physical fitness means iron self-discipline and the ability to overcome difficulties. The heroine of Natalie Portman scares and depresses absolutely everything, she is 100% immersed in the world of her paranoid delusions and psychological complexes. It seems that she is already at the beginning of the film at the stage of mental illness, when it is impossible to move confidently in space. If there is a healthy spirit in a healthy body, the unhealthy spirit in turn destroys the body. What exercises can we talk about if she is already panicking about her own legs?
The film turned out to be completely vulgar. The career of a ballerina is not presented here except through the bed of the director. Speaking of director Tama (Cassel). Looking at how he tries to seduce the main character, it is amazing how he is a director at all, with such a complete inability to feel the artist, the person, to understand, in the end, who is in front of you. He behaves simply as a character of jokes about a stereotypical sexually preoccupied Frenchman. How, in his life and stage experience, does he not see a man with giant cockroaches in his head? However, given the above, it is not surprising that he did not expect to meet such a specimen in the ballet company. Still, he looks stupid and stupid. And, as if this is not enough - all this unfinished, painful lesbian erotica.
In addition, the film is simply unpleasant to the extreme. A lot of unpleasant physiological details - cuts and abrasions close-up, hallucinations in the form of deformities of the limbs; the heroine now and then vomiting, she is drunk, then hangover, then sick ... Not a single more or less pleasant character is the oppressive mother of the main character, who sees only a little girl in her, the supplier is a stupid and anxious egoist, the heroine’s best friend is a stupid walking girl sitting on “wheels”. The atmosphere of paranoia, all people and things are ready at any moment to show their hideous inside out, change, sting.
Saving on ballet, the filmmakers invested in special effects. But why do we need them? Is it necessary to visualize all his glitches to show a madman? Inappropriate directness turns the last third of the film into a three-body horror, which looks ridiculous, given the claim of “Black Swan” to the status of a serious author’s film.
I understand that it was intended to make the film gloomy and hopeless. But the problem is that it should not be so anti-aesthetic - it was clearly planned beautiful, but even perverse beauty in it is not, only the boundless anxiety and longing of a cornered and confused person. Most importantly, there is no attempt to show something beautiful. Only tormented by schizophrenia pseudoballerina in unkempt scenery.
Bottom line: total disappointment. Skillfully and economically filmed nonsense schizophrenic.
2 out of 10
Original
