Black Swan

When you watch a ballet performance or a theater play or anything that involves live performances you expect the character’s emotions to transpire to the audience. In theater this is done mainly by actors, in ballet this is done by the dancer’s performance and the choreography.
Darren Aronofsky does with Black Swan what a live performance does to the audience.
The story is simple: Nina, a young ballet dancer at New York’s Lincoln Center is cast as the lead in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and she has to play both the white and the black swan. The execution of this contradiction seems impossible at first, but Nina artfully overcomes it with the cost of her own sanity.
The real story, the one that pulsates in our minds, is how much Nina is going to choose to sacrifice of her life in order to bring this duplicity on stage. We know she has sacrificed a lot by the way she lives. The apartment feels like a cage, a cell almost, you can almost touch the austerity, the claustrophobic feel. And her mother, a former ballet dancer, has turned her room into a shrine for Nina, one of the most thrilling sites ever.
At work, things have the same feel. In the repetition room black is predominant, the other dancers are dressed in black and the autocratic ruler of the house, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a beastly character well known for his affairs with other dancers is fully aware of his power and of art’s fragility.
Just like ballet, the movie is a perfect union between actors and choreography. In charge of the choreography, Aronofsky masterfully shapes each scene to lure the audience and play with it’s senses. The unsettling soundtrack (created by Clint Mansell) expands on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake themes, the character’s close-ups enhance the emotion, the movement of the camera stuns the viewer and sets him in the spotlight on stage.
As a whole, Black Swan is like a live performance that has been practiced to exhaustion and has rendered perfection. It’s a movie that is haunting and takes pride in being a form of art. Just like ballet.