Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” has opened the Venice Film Festival and reviews are now coming in fast; most describe a film that wears the influences the director has pointed to — “All About Eve,” “The Tenant,” “The Red Shoes” — very clearly, but also very powerfully. The film centers on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer (Natalie Portman) and a rival, played by Mila Kunis, who may or may not be a figment of the dancer’s imagination, and co-stars Winona Ryder, Vincent Cassel, Sebastian Stan and Barbara Hershey. Here’s what critics are saying about the film.
Variety’s Peter Debruge makes the clear the connection between “Black Swan” and “The Wrestler” (which Aronofsky called companion pieces) noting that the film “serves as a fascinating complement to Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” trading the grungy world of a broken-down fighter for the more upscale but no less brutal sphere of professional ballet.” Even more intriguing, he notes that “Aronofsky seems to be operating more in the vein of early Roman Polanski or David Cronenberg at his most operatic…..the latter third of “Black Swan” depicts a highly subjective view of events that calls to mind the psychological disintegration of both ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby.'”
Mike Goodridge at Screen International (via Awards Daily) says the film is an Oscar lock, with Natalie Portman in particular earning high praise. “If the film is ultimately too unsettling to snag main prizes, it has at least one nomination in the bag for lead actress Natalie Portman who gives one of “those” performances, transforming herself after ten months of training into an accomplished ballerina, almost uncomfortable to watch as she consumes her difficult role….like Catherine Deneuve in ‘Repulsion’ or Mia Farrow in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ she captures the confusion of a repressed young woman thrown into a world of danger and temptation with frightening veracity.”
In his four-star review, Guy Lodge at InContention reveals the film to be “a contemporary fairy tale of sorts: the story of a little girl, in the fierce grip of controlling adults, who wants nothing more than to dance, and learns that she must exchange part of herself for the opportunity….that’s only after it has successfully masqueraded as a taut, witty and wickedly kinky thriller that pulls off the tricky double-bluff of following precisely the narrative course one has mapped out for it, yet emerging as all the more surprising for that adherence.”
IndieWire’s Todd McCarthy opens his review by calling the film “‘Red Shoes’ on acid,” but isn’t quite as taken with it. He finds that the film eventually goes “goes over the top in something approaching grand guignol fashion,” though he gives praise for Cassel’s “commanding performance” as a French choreographer, and Hershey gets singled out for her “grating” performance as Portman’s mother who nurses “a perennial grudge over having given up her own career to raise her daughter, to the point where she resembles the mother in ‘Carrie’ more than someone who actually lives in the real world.”
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter is perhaps the most clear cut about his displeasure with film, giving “Black Swan” its first outright pan, admiring its technical achievements but not buying its narrative. “‘Swan’ is an instant guilty pleasure, a gorgeously shot, visually complex film whose badness is what’s so good about it. You might howl at the sheer audacity of mixing mental illness with the body-fatiguing, mind-numbing rigors of ballet, but its lurid imagery and a hellcat competition between two rival dancers is pretty irresistible,” adding that the “horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.”
But if you’re just looking for unabashed praise, Robert Beames at Obsessed With Film blows a pantload calling “Black Swan” “A perfect film that blends ‘The Red Shoes’ with ‘Antichrist,’ via Cronenberg,” and saying it’s the “best film I’ve seen all year. Left me devastated, excited, tense and emotionally drained. Tarantino will be a fool if he doesn’t give this the Golden Lion (unless something even better is coming up!). Aronofsky has made his first masterpiece and Portman must now be favourite for the Oscar.”