BLACK SWAN

dMYD

Starring Natalie Portman

Trailer

Y

Perfection. It’s not just an ironically titled new hell-quiz from the BBC, it’s an unobtainable fantasy-transfiguration of reality itself! Art longs for perfection because it’s one more twist up the spout from walking down the high street and crying fat, grey tears. Life can’t be perfect. Life doesn’t have perfection in the brochure, and so it looks to art to provide it. But perfection, bless, is impossible. As Noel Gallagher sang, possibly as an excuse for his whole nasty career, ‘True perfection has to be imperfect… I know that that sounds foolish but it’s true.’ The song’s forgotten, Oasis are rubbish. But the sentiment stands tall amongst humankind’s monuments to its own inadequacy. Here lies the ideal of perfectionism. It’s perfectly ridiculous.

A twisting, chasseing nightmare of artistic aspiration, Black Swan goal-slams the tricky hat trick of being watchable, making ballet interesting, and delivering a credible essay on imperfection, all the while giving Natalie Portman a new reason for existing besides her face. In her best performance since being thirteen years old, P-Man gives a show-stopper that slaps her up to the a-list of people pretending to do things, amazing and terrifying in equal measures as a dedicated perfectionist with a peeling grasp on humanity and reality. Doe-eyed and sinew-flexed, she’s constantly on edge, digging at bits of her imperfect chassis and gulping down nitrous levels of paranoia and sexual insanity whilst twirling around pretending to be a bird. A mental and physical swan-fuck of a lead show isn’t the only game in town, with Aronofsky’s direction keeping just the right side of sublime over ridiculous and excellent supporting players occasionally drifting into view to facilitate another attack of the Wiggins. The horror’s splashed with some of the most restrained CGI ever seen on film, the subtle use of digital effects sculpting a sensuous mood of prickly unease rather than blowing up everything in a fifty foot radius and giving animals the power to wink; between this and other recent maestro work Scott Pilgrim it seems that 2011 might actually deliver on 1999’s promise of CGI being worth a damn, and for that it should be commended.

Beautiful, disturbing, full of dancing…and for a film about perfection, it’s reliably imperfect. Over the top, demented, not ambivalent enough, it just falls short of the artistic merits it showcases, making the film itself a meta-fictional document of humanity’s inability to be Gods. But then if anything can make a room full of teenagers watch ballet for two hours in total silence, it’s doing EVERYTHING right. Perfect.