Black Swan

Fair warning now: most people will hate this movie. It is over the top (but it knows it) it is even clichéd (until you see past it) and it is grotesque. It is about the hell that a dancer, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) goes through on her road to the Swan Queen in the New York ballet production of Swan Lake. It is devastating. In the movie, Portman is bulimic, she cuts, she fantasizes, she goes crazy, she revolts against her oppressive mother, her feet split all in and for pain of ballet. She wants to be perfect. That is the movie. It is great, of that I have no doubt, although in the middle I did feel some reluctance to like it based upon the clichés of the script. However, if you pay attention while you watch a movie, there's a scene that tells you what is real and what was not, and all those clichés become elevated. You realize that all of the freak outs of Portman are what she thought she was supposed to feel. And that they were all coming out of the back of her mind, she was going crazy so she experienced crazy thoughts and psycho-sexual moments like people (in the movies do). But she knows they never happened. Rather, she made those things happen so that she could believe certain things so that she could do certain things (torture her body, torture her mind).
       A lot has been said that this movie isn't very good by dancers. I attack this now: the movie is about the pain dancers put them through because of pressure. I argue that a dancer either doens't like the movie because the themes come too close to home or that the pressure seems silly (Oh please, she [Portman] is so whiny! When I was a dancer the pressure was so much higher and we didn't do stupid shit like that). But this is the quintessential dancer movie. It shows the dark side of perfectionsim, the dark side of the soul. It should also be admired by dancers for the following reasons: Dancing is shot on stage, the strains of the dancers (their breathing, their frightened eyes) are shown up close. Especially one scene where Portman is doing turns is breathtaking, for in slow motion you see how every time she has to jump up on her toes.
      A last note: Portman spent 5-8 hours a day for a year training for this role. It's one of the best performances of all time.
Black Swan: ★★★★