BLACK SWAN

Black swan‘s 2010 film, FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES in association with CROSS CREEK PICTURES presents a DARREN ARONOFSKY film “BLACK SWAN” . Black swan movie content strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use. The movie has release on 12/3/2010 and DVD released on 20/3/2010. The movie opens as Nina Sayers (NATALIE PORTMAN), a young ballerina in her middle twenties, is dancing the opening part to Swan Lake. Swan Lake is a ballet in which a princess is turned into the White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears endless loyalty to her. In the ballet, she is betrayed by the Black Swan, the evil magician's daughter whom the magician has transformed to look accurately like the princess so as to trick the prince who has fallen in love with her.

End of the movie, the princess attended suicide because the Prince's disloyalty has doomed her to remain a swan forever. As Nina dances in the role of the Princess, the magician appears and places the nuisance on the Princess. Nina then wakes up in her bungalow, the dance sequence having been a dream. She begins her daily ballet stretching and use to tell her mother about her dream as her mother unintentionally ignores her. Nina mentions that the director, Thomas Leroy (pronounced Tomas; the name is French), of her ballet company has promised to feature her more this season and her mother agrees that she's been there long enough. 

Before I can provide you with a decent Black Swan movie analysis, we first need to take a look at the overall plot of the film. This section is filled with spoilers, so you might consider skipping this part if you‘ve yet to see the film. Black swan is set in New York City, where a respected ballet company is making plans to put on a production of Swan Lake. Aging ballet superstar Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) has been kicked to the curb, and company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is looking for some fresh meat to fill the dual lead role of the White Swan and the Black Swan. 

In the scene, which Nina present one of the most tricky dances and end up developing black swan wings was realised as an arrangement live action, motion capture and computer graphic. They spend a lot of time in preproduction on the design of the wings and what the final character would look like; Darren wanted the anatomy of the human transition into the anatomy of a swan. They actually ended up buying us a swan skeleton which we digitised and created 3d net of to morph into a human skeleton, it was great to study and do research into  how is the structure of the wing and a human arm can morph into each other.

Artists described the thought of giving the personality many swan attributes, not only for the wings. In the real, Darren wanted to have long neck shape but it was always just a little bit goofy looking. It’s a beautiful moment in the film an in Nina’s head the wings were such a beautiful vision, and Natalie Portman is really so beautiful, that it didn’t really need much more than that. So we ended up with a wing growth and feathers creeping up her neck only just a little bit.

New York based curious pictures erected a motion capture set up on the college location using 24 Vicon cameras to film a professional dancer carrying out the moves. It was little bit of a jerry rig to get a sound stage set up with a motion control rig onto a location. That they did meant have to augment our motion capture data hand tracking, but it was important to start with that basis as far as the actual ballet dance.

 Other than that, Thomas who encourages Nina to have a high regard for the company's new ballerina, funky free spirit and Olympic standard minx Lily (Mila Kunis), who helps release Nina's life which force with seductive overtures of friendship, and more. But Lily simply wants to steal Nina's role. As Nina's concern intensifies, she is worried about a strange feathery skin rash and it becomes swayed that her sign in the mirror continues to stare at her after she has turned away.

But, in piece of evidence, with its creepy Manhattan interiors, its scary, close up camera movements, and its surrounding conspiracy of evil, it looks more like Rosemary's Baby, particularly in cinematographer really brilliant and clever continuously explored in which Nina went out with some random guys in a club, and she then wakes up to turns to what she's doing and freaked out, blunders through shadowy winding corridors and out into the night air, there seems no difference between inside and outside. Everywhere is claustrophobic.

 As the ballet movie has to be compared with Michael Powell and Emeric Press burger’s The Red Shoes, and the figure of Thomas is observably encouraged by Anton Walbrook's renowned martinet. Although, Thomas is rather less high minded and Nina's aggressive in rehearsal is also taken from Powell and Press burger. But again, their influence might be more from the convent drama Black Narcissus, and the final confrontation of Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr. There are also hints of John Landis's An American Werewolf in London.

This happens to be the second film recently that has used the Swan Lake theme, Xavier Beauvoir’s Of Gods and Men featured it counter naturally, at the disaster of a severe and spiritual tale of French monks. Its use in Black Swan is self-explanatory, it is more obviously grandiloquent and excessive and appropriate to the fireworks going off in Nina's head.

 In both cases, the Swan Lake theme is technically digenetic, in that the music is physically present in the story, being played respectively on the monks' old tape machine and in the orchestra pit. But my goodness, Aronofsky likes to play that Swan Lake theme loud. He's probably right to do so.  Gloriously direct music needs to be punched over, and punched over it is. Motor head could not have played the Swan Lake theme any louder than this. I left the cinema with blood trickling from my ears.

Black Swan is ionospherically over the top, and some of its effects are overdone, but it is richly, sensually enjoyable and there is such fascination in seeing Portman surrender to the madness and watch her face transmute into a horror-mask like a nightmare version of Maria Callas. It is exciting, quite mad and often really scary.

by,

YOGESWARY ARUMUGAM 

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