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.

Pi (1998)

“As soon as you discard scientific rigour, you're no longer a mathematician; you're a numerologist.”

I’m still a bit dazed from the experience of this film. It is its own, claustrophobic little world, ant that owes as much to the look of the film as anything. The alienating texture of the monochrome footage and the never-ending stream of varying degrees of close-ups- I counted not one long shot in the film- offer us a dreamlike, claustrophobic reality reflecting that of our (possibly) unreliable narrator, Max Cohen.

Max is clearly a genius, highly qualified mathematician, but this has not brought him material wealth (he lives in a grotty little New York apartment building as does, depressingly, his similarly blessed mentor, Sol). He has obvious trouble connecting with people, even his gorgeous neighbour Devi, who is lovely and feeds him up with yummy samosas. Then again, there’s her name- is she supposed to represent material temptation- the devil? I hope not. I really rather fancy her.

I suppose the opening monologue about staring into the sun, evoking Icarus and returned to throughout the film, pretty much foreshadows the whole film. But this film is very poetic for something so centred on mathematical. I ought to mention, by the way, that my education has been all arts and humanities and that everything I know about maths I got from books on popular science. So I may have heard about the Golden Mean, Fibonacci numbers and stuff like that, but I don’t begin to understand the actual maths bit. Thought I’d best mention that. Just in case you started getting crazy ideas about me being vaguely qualified to review this movie or something…

Max’s obsession with mathematically cracking the chaos that is the stock market is much more successful than he realises, but has a much deeper significance which means that both Orthodox Jews and faceless corporate types will stop at very little to discover his secret… if, that is, we consider Max to be a reliable narrator. Darren Aronofsky (who is impressing me hugely as both writer and director) keeps this nicely ambiguous, making it clear that Max subsists on an entire chemists’ worth of pills, showing us weird dream sequences, and keeping the direction uncertain. Certainly, the fact that there are no comebacks for Max at the end seems to hint that it may all be in his head. What do I know, though; there’s so much symbolism that I don’t get. What’s the significance of the man with blood dripping from his hand? And the Coney Island sequence? Is the metal detectorist some kind of metaphor for materialism, or even capitalism? Don’t ask me!

Sol, I think, is supposed to be then voice of sanity and reason, so it’s both significant and worrying that he eventually dies of a stroke, paralleling Max.

I know very little about Kabbalah, except that it connects Alan Moore and Madonna, two very odd bedfellows. I am, of course, aware that numerology of all kinds is not only bollocks but Daily Mail- sanctioned bollocks, but this film pulls it off with so much style and verve, and pulls in so many genuine historical thinkers, that the whole thing works brilliantly. Likewise, I’ve no idea how Rabbi Cohen’s big revelation about the Cohenim and the name of God would be received by a religious Jew, but not being one I have no problem and simply find that it works beautifully as a dramatic plot revelation, and the unveiling of Max’s personal God complex is almost the climax of the film.

Returning to the lovely Devi, she appears to be Max’s only source of food, and is the only person we hear having sex this mean she represents animal urges as opposed to dry, abstract thought? Is there something Manichean going on here? It’s very hard, interpreting the symbols in this film, not to be simultaneously wrong and pretentious. We hear Devi copulating at the same time as we hear drilling, and we see Max having his breakdown. Does this point forward to the rather gruesome and physical climax of Max using a drill to lobotomise himself? Is this the victory of the animal over the cerebral? I’m buggered if I know but I had enormous fun watching the film.