Fun Stuff > ENJOY

BLACK SWAN IS APPARENTLY AMAZING, SOMEONE C/D

<< < (4/23) > >>

KvP:
Perhaps the mom character does care about her daughter, but her motives are harder to discern than those of her counterpart in Vincent Cassell - for one, her controlling behavior is pretty over-the-top, the cake scene in particular, and it felt to me as though her resentment towards her daughter gives her an impulse to sabotage as much as save her (though that is some extrapolation on my part) and in any case she'll only help her daughter on her own draconian terms. Cassell, on the other hand, while being a generally pervy and handsy type, was genuine in his assessment of Nina's technique and earnest in his desire to see her nail the black swan. I feel like that difference may have to do with Nina's perspective, though, since she chafes under and fears her mother while practically worships the director. Aside from possibly the last scene the film seems entirely immersed in Nina's headspace.

I was thinking about Lost Highway when watching it a lot too, particularly in that both movies have (arguably) a clear point of demarcation between the period in the narrative where the main character is balancing precariously on the edge of breakdown and the full descent into the psychotic rabbit hole, so to speak.

SPOILERS ARE HERE
...
...
...
...
...
In Lost Highway the turning point is the arrest of Bill Pullman's character, where his cognitive dissonance and denial are so strong that he becomes an entirely different person (and a much worse actor). For Black Swan it's Nina's night out, when she stands up to her mother for presumably the first time, admits to herself her repressed sexual desires (and even deeper gay/bi desires / deep-seated Freudian issues) and generally achieves the abandon needed for the black swan part at the ultimate cost of her sanity and (possibly) life. When she came home and her mother didn't acknowledge Lily it immediately signaled for me that the point of total lunacy had been reached.
...
END SPOILERS



So hey they got rid of smaller-than-average font sizes. I have no idea how to provide foolproof spoilers now.

KvP:
Anyway it should be said that even if the film's themes are unmistakably Cronenbergian they are equally Aranofsky...an. He makes films about destructive obsessions. It just so happens that with this one and his alleged next project (about a man who gradually turns himself into a cyborg, apparently) he's venturing into territory well-tread by the Canadian psych-horror demigod.

Johnny C:
cronenberg is a really appropriate thing. there's apparently a large debt to several polanski films which doesn't surprise me, and argento's a pretty good reference point in some ways as well.

the thing with the mother is that, yeah, there's an emphasis on the controlling behaviour (cake scene was egregious, although it ended with one of the more legitimately uncomfortable mom/nina bits in the movie), but the resistance on nina's part is really strange and aggressive and not altogether healthy either; she's capable of some serious emotional violence against her mother. it's an unhealthy and strange relationship and the mother has a controlling impulse for sure but i think it's frequently and in several ways rendered somewhat impotent. the power dynamic seems obvious but there's a lot of ambiguity within it.

spoiler
plus there are scenes where her concern for her daughter is surely genuine (e.g. the scene where nina screams and tears down all the pictures) and there are scenes that make you think her control issues stem from far longer-term fears about her daughter's health that she's ultimately powerless to affect (viz. nina's perpetual scratching).

two of the best movies i've seen this year have been like litmus-test psych-horror endurance runs, which is like really weird

Johnny C:
also i'm seriously surprised that people can find any part of this film particularly erotic since even those scenes are suffused with dread

e: question, though, i guess: is the movie's use of sexuality and sex exploitative?

double edit: reading some reviews i think the globe & mail's rick groen hits on kind of the way i feel about the functions performed by obvious & literal metaphor in the movie


--- Quote ---At this point, as we’re drawn deep inside Nina’s fearful psyche, it’s becoming hard to distinguish the actual from the imagined. The bloody scratches on her back are surely real – in a physically punishing business, she’s given to self-mutilation. But when those scratches morph into inky scales and then black feathers, or when she wraps her rival in a lesbian embrace and then gets mean with a shard of glass … well, these are the way-over-the-top sequences where the film doesn’t just “lose itself” but its audience too. This is the risible stuff.

Or is it? The doings in the original Swan Lake are laughable at a literal level but poignant and lovely when viewed metaphorically. Maybe Aronofsky, in retelling the story and reshaping the imagery for a different medium, deserves the same respect. More profoundly, maybe he’s upping the thematic ante by adding a further element to the ballet’s explorations of the tensions between opposites – that is, art’s own tension between the literal and the symbolic, and the consequent wavering of the audience between dismissive laughter and engaged emotion.
--- End quote ---

Avec:
One particular thing that bothered me was Nina's age. How old was she supposed to be?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page