Beaches (1988)

"I just want to get rid of us before us gets bad."

Yes, I know; this is a chick flick. I watched it because my lovely wife wanted to show me one of her favourite films and I'm blogging it because it's quite well known. And you know what? I quite enjoyed it. I won't put it any stronger than that; it isn't superlatively brilliant in the way that Pretty Woman is (yes, I did just say that), but it's a good film.

The film follows the lives of two women from childhood to one of them suffering a tragic, early death. CC is poor, Jewish and very much a New Yorker, while Hillary is a rich WASP girl from an established East Coast family. They bond over shared ambitions to go into musical theatre- a world of which I know nothing- but their very different natures later lead to both friction and reconciliation.

Much as CC may struggle in her early days through lack of money, she benefits from being carefree and unrestricted, while Hillary is pressured into becoming a bored housewife to an awful, snobbish husband, and CC's telling it like it is here leads to the big clash between them that drives the structure of the main plot. Their eventual full reconciliation only comes at the price of Hillary's sad decline and death. There is a happy ending, of sorts, as CC adopts Hillary's orphaned daughter.

It's a fairly gripping drama, and Bette Midler is superb. I won't pretend this is my cup of tea but there are many things to enjoy in this film.

Black Swan (2010)

“Get ready to give me more of that bite!”

This is only the second film helmed by Darren Aronofsky that I’ve seen ( I reviewed π a fair while ago), and already he’s threatening to become one of my favourites. The previous film, an early effort, was low budget and independent, while this is a big Hollywood film, but the directorial style is just as uncompromised. This film, essentially, rocks. It’s intense. It’s clever. Once again there’s a focus on the inner life of one character, although I suppose I‘d have to see more of Aronofsky’s films to know whether this is a thing of him. But this film rules. Sod it, it’s about ballet, and I loved it. Do you have any idea how little I knew or cared about ballet?

In reality, though, this film could be set within any milieu where the competition is intense and overpowering. It’s hard to see a more extreme example of this than in the life of the ballerina, though; out of a large chorus there are only a few who make it big. The dietary restrictions are impossibly draconian. Joints are cracked as part of a regular ritual sure to guarantee consequences later in life. The sacrifices made are huge, and yet it may lead to nothing, as was the case with Nina’s mother, who simultaneously places her hopes in her daughter and jealously puts her down.

This is not a healthy lifestyle in any sense. In the case of Nina there is disturbingly graphic self-harm, sexual favours given for the sake of a good role, and ultimately derangement of a kind which is beautifully demonstrated throughout the film; only towards the tragic denouement do we realise just how many of the events have happened only in Nina’s imagination. The film is a slow unravelling of one obsessed young woman’s life, and it’s riveting.

Natalie Portman carries the film, with credit also due to Mila Kunis as the grounded and stable Lily and Vincent Cassel, so great in La Haine, as Maestro Thomas LeRoy, in the first time I’ve seen him in an English language film. LeRoy is a deeply creepy individual, using his power over these desperately ambitious, attractive young women in ways which are desperately predictable. Also worthy of praise is Winona Rder as Beth, whose fate prefigures the horrors which await Nina and point towards the meaninglessness of such obsession. Only those such as Lily, with a sense of perspective and a life outside ballet, survive relatively unscathed.

The climactic scenes, of Nina’s performance, are deeply clever, sublimely directed, and lead us to question much of what we’ve seen. This is a very clever, very visual and delightfully weird film which takes an art house sensibility and puts it into the relative mainstream. It’s a must see, whether you follow ballet or not.