(<>_<>) Danse macabre reveals ballet's dark side (<>_<>)
The daring and original director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) lures audiences into a haunting, fractured world of delusions, doubles and paranoia in Black Swan, his first psychological thriller. He spins a sensual and chilling tale of a prima ballerina locked in an obsessive battle with dark impulses that slowly engulf her.
Far from the typical thriller set in a world of crime or haunted houses, Aronofsky's intimate portrait of a woman unraveling at the very seams of her psyche takes place in the least expected of realms, the artistically electric and physically demanding world of professional ballet. For Aronofsky, it was the perfect place to unfold a visually explosive tale of the obsessive pressure to be perfect. As with The Wrestler, the film also gave him a chance to plunge into an unseen world and peel back what makes the people who are driven to sacrifice so much.
Although he started thinking about this story fifteen years ago, Aronofsky noted that Black Swan is intentionally a companion piece to The Wrestler. Black Swan dips into moments of sheer psychological horror unlike anything Aronofsky has done before. The two films are tied together however by themes of bodily extremes, souls in turmoil and by a filmmaking style that pulls the audience inside the characters' fascinating inner worlds.
"Some people call wrestling the lowest of art forms, and some call ballet the highest of art forms, yet there is something elementally the same. Mickey Rourke as a wrestler was going through something very similar to Natalie Portman as a ballerina," Aronofsky explained. "They're both artists who use their bodies to express themselves and they're both threatened by physical injury, because their bodies are the only tool they have for expression. What was interesting for me was to find these two connected stories in what might appear to be unconnected worlds."
The two films are also tied by a lead performance that dives well beneath the surface, says Aronofsky, who compares Portman's commitment to that of Rourke. "The role of Nina is quite different from anything Natalie has done before," Aronofsky noted, "and she took it to another level. Playing Nina was as much an athletic feat as a feat of acting."
The challenges of making Black Swan were also similar to the notably intense production of The Wrestler, perhaps even harder. As secretive as the world of professional wrestling can be, Aronofsky found the ballet world even more insular and closed-off to outsiders.
And then there was the training that Natalie Portman had to undertake in order to make the film's ballet scenes as incandescently lyrical as they are full of mounting tension and foreboding. "Ballet is something most people start training for when they're four or five years old and as they live it, it changes their bodies, it transforms them. To have an actress who hasn't gone through all of that convincingly play a professional ballet dancer is the tallest of orders. Yet somehow, with her incredible will and discipline, Natalie became a dancer. It took ten months of vigorous work, but her body transformed and even the most serious dancers were impressed. I'm convinced that the physical work also connected her to the emotional work," Aronofsky explained.
Aronofsky finally got the chance to express his idea for Black Swan 10 years ago via a screenplay by Andrés Heinz – a dark drama that took place on Broadway, setting up a perilous rivalry between an actress and her mysterious understudy. Aronofsky was intrigued, but having grown up as a witness to his sister's shockingly tough training as a ballet dancer, he wanted to switch the backdrop to that of a premiere New York ballet company. This change led to the creation of Nina and Lily, two competitive rising dance stars willing to sacrifice anything and everything for that one perfect performance.
Even as he was engaged in other projects for many years, Aronofsky continued developing the project with Mark Heyman (who co-produced The Wrestler).
It was Aronofsky's idea to merge Heinz's original concept with the story behind the world's most popular ballet, Swan Lake, which tells the story of a dramatic duel between innocence and wickedness. All the while, he was also working with Heyman to create the macabre new twist which galvanized the tale. In the final draft, the key elements of Swan Lake – swans, demons, spells and doubles – became entwined with Nina's psyche as it shatters into a psychosexual kaleidoscope of shards, turning her from a naïve young girl into a dangerous, metamorphosed creature.
"The story became about Nina's fears of losing who she is," Aronofsky said. "That is something I think everyone can relate to, but Nina becomes completely overtaken by those fears until her reality becomes inseparable from the character she is playing....
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