Black Swan

It was immensely beneficial for me to have watched The Wrestler for the first time a couple weeks ago before going into this. They're flip sides to the cinema of personal holocaust gender coin with The Wrestler wallowing in a lunkheaded "can't teach an old dog new tricks" masculinity and Black Swan pulverizing the audience with its visceral feminine emotional instability rooted in crippling body image and self worth issues. Aronofsky is clearly coming into his own as an individualistic auteur with these films, but I don't know if I find them as emotionally devastating or technically fascinating as PI or Requiem for a Dream. The less said about The Fountain, the better. What I'm getting at, is that judging by the critical acclaim and box office his last 2 films have garnered, Aronofsky is moving beyond the precocious, blistering genius of his early work into a stately, masterful confidence. He's attaining a most impressive level of consistency and clarity of vision. Whereas that makes his work more palatable, in my estimation, it also makes it more predictable, and therefore, less interesting.

Don't get me wrong, Black Swan is a masterpiece and certainly one of the best films of the year (definitely the best horror film of the year... more on that later). The pitch perfect casting pays off earth shaking dividends with uniformly excellent performances, especially from surefire Oscar winner Portman. The music, cinematography and costume design are all beyond reproach. It's just..... well, I guess I was expecting something more. It says a great deal how spoiled we as cinema enthusiasts are with the likes of Aronofsky, Edgar Wright, Fincher and the Coen Brothers all putting out a film every year or so that I could conceivably be let down by such a well made piece of art. Perhaps it was due to the proximity of my viewing of The Wrestler which gave it a sense of well fashioned redundancy. Perhaps it was because I recently watched my Criterion collection bluray of The Red Shoes and could see where the narrative framework was laid 62 years ago. During Black Swan, I kept flashing back to The Red Shoes and wondering why it is that film makers of a bygone era would tell an eerily similar story with a comparably sinister tone, yet imbue it with so much magic and wonder, while its modern counterpart would be mired in such oppressive mental illness. I also kept flashing to the Craig Scheffer starring Hellraiser Inferno with its constant lapsing into waking nightmare imagery and familiar "is THIS reality?" territory, and that, my friends, is no film to be brought to mind during a screening of an awards season darling.

In any case, I will gladly state that Black Swan is the single greatest horror film of 2010. It reaches a ferocious fever pitch of spine chilling malevolence for the last third that refuses to release you from its death grip. You feel positively violated and worn out by the end and that is surely the signifier of a great film. A great film, but not necessarily an interesting one. After having my eyeballs and intellect raped by Gulliver's Travels two nights prior, it was a welcome respite from slapdash storytelling and shitty, murky 3-D. I was pleased to see this in a mainstream theater with crisp, stunning projection and a harrowing sound system punishing me for the duration. I can no longer abide art house theaters with their sub-par accommodations and over priced tickets. Judging from how well Black Swan, The Fighter and True Grit are performing in the face of Focker failure and Jack Black's box office belly flop, this appears to be a refreshing trend we can look forward to further capitalizing on. Who knows, maybe in a couple of months I'll be sitting down to an IMAX screening of Tetsuo: Bulletman. Probably not, but a misanthrope can dream can't he?