Elimination dance: Black Swan

There’s a moment when ballet impresario Thomas (Vincent Cassel), having taken a risk in casting the exceedingly demure Nina (Natalie Portman) as the schizophrenic dual lead in his new production of Swan Lake, explains that Nina will succeed so long as she lets go of her fear. “The only person standing in your way,” Thomas tells her, “is you.” But these words intended as reassurance, spoken fairly late in Black Swan, couldn’t sound more ominous. Nina’s capacity for confusing her internal ambivalence with some external, independent, diabolical force has by now been demonstrated in myriad scenes marked by vivid hallucination. We’ve come to presume that Nina’s only path to artistic transcendence is one that requires a morbid, perilously complete identification with her role.

Black Swan makes a fascinating companion piece to director Darren Aronofsky’s previous film The Wrestler. Both closely follow their protagonists through a crisis resulting at least in part from ambitions of athletic perfection. It’s possible that Nina would have arrived at the same crisis point without the pressures of ballet, but the film seems drawn to persuading us of a hypothesis concerning the psychological cost of zero body fat and immersion in a milieu that consumes and virtually cloisters those devoted to its craft. Aronofsky revels in the amplified cracking of sore toes, in close-ups of wounds, in the eeriness of rehearsal hall mirrors, invoking the funhouse and foreshadowing the proliferation of doppelgängers to come.

Then there’s Nina’s home life, that frilly pink bedroom where her attempt at the masturbation, as prescribed by the sleazy but shrewd Thomas, is overseen by a menagerie of plush toys—not to mention Erica (Barbara Hershey), Nina’s mom, a failed ballerina herself who’s life now consists largely of suffocating her daughter with hysterical maternal concern. It’s interesting to note that in The Entity Hershey played a woman repeatedly sexually assaulted by an invisible demon, but almost no one believes her—everyone thinks that she’s crazy. By contrast, you might say that Nina’s tragedy emerges from the fact that no one acknowledges that she’s crazy, even though she exhibits kleptomaniac and masochistic tendencies. But the film that comes to mind once we get a sense of Nina’s fraught domestic life is Carrie, with its oppressive, infantilizing mom and naïve daughter whose ascendance to queenly status seems doomed. Like both Carrie and The Entity, Black Swan is a horror film. Like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, it’s a horror film that derives its particular effects through rigorous subjectivity.

Working from a script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin, Aronofsky keeps things moving at a remarkably clipped pace. Even on a second viewing I marveled at the way the film gallops through a lot of story without slackening. I think the problems with Black Swan become prominent when all that story seems to evaporate ahead of schedule. We start to feel this when Thomas repeats the exact same, maddeningly vague critique of Nina’s work—that’s she won’t “let go”—for the umpteenth time. Despite Portman’s radical transformation during the final act, the film never gives us any sense of what makes dance either dynamic or staid, sensual or frigid, because Aronofsky doesn’t appear to be the slightest bit interested in dance. Aronofsky is much more engaged in the deployment of his Goyaesque bestiary, perhaps echoing Ingmar Bergman’s somewhat similarly themed Hour of the Wolf, but a significant difference between Bergman’s film and Aronofsky’s is that the more obviously hallucinatory Black Swan’s hallucinations become, the cornier and more shallow the film’s entire notion of psychological frailty feels. Aronofsky deftly gets us worked up as the film builds toward its climax, but the entire last act finally feels silly, those escalating spasms of psychic unease that make a lot of fuss without taking us anywhere new, other than offering further attempts at shock with diminishing returns. Still, I heartily recommend taking Black Swan’s mostly riveting journey to the end of Nina’s psychic tether. I just don’t want to lead you to believe that there’s any place to fall once that tether slips out of her grasp.

Lost in space, dying of spiritual thirst: Looking back at Darren Aronofsky's Fountain

On the eve of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, I thought it would be fun to look back at a review I wrote for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film almost unanimously dismissed upon its appearance at TIFF 2006, and which might have torpedoed the ambitious young filmmaker's career if it weren't followed by the much celebrated The Wrestler, which had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. Aronofsky's Black Swan is among the most anticipated films playing at this year's festival.

***

Six years after Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain finally arrives with a hefty load of extra-filmic baggage –an infamously protracted and tumultuous production, boos at the Venice Film Festival– and a premise so dazzlingly pretentious as to guarantee responses even more polarized that those that met its predecessor. Yet if this finds the right audience –probably small, probably fans of Ken Russell films, Herman Hesse novels, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell and psychotropic substances– it will in its peculiar way be embraced as the sort of wildly flawed, improbably ambitious gem that comes along only rarely, a phenomenon akin to a comet, the sighting of some endangered beast, or a functioning health care system.

The Fountain’s structure is tripartite and intrinsically circular. In one strand we find Thomas (Hugh Jackman), a genetic scientist desperate to shrink a tumour in a monkey’s brain while his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) dies from some terrible illness and composes an enigmatic novel in laughably immaculate calligraphy. In the second, Tomas (again, Jackman) is a conquistador charged with finding the Mayan tree of life in the New World for the lovely Queen Isabel (Weisz). In the third, Tom (yep, Jackman) is the lone inhabitant of some hermetic ball adrift in space, haunted by voices and doing kung fu against the stars. These narratives dove-tail and are compressed into 96 minutes, an impressively taut running time that renders two of these strands, not inappropriately, into virtual cinematic haikus. Visual dynamics dominate: long-shots press up against extra-tight close-ups; gaseous portals seep through the jaundiced glow of space, recalling old sci-fi paperback covers; terrifyingly fecund jungles give way to stark wintry plains. The aesthetic is alternately seductive, chillingly lonely and somewhat oppressive.

Dialogue tends to be awkward, scenes contrived and characters more symbolic than recognizable. What’s of substance here is the fluid realization of deeply primal themes, thus Aronofsky thinks nothing of having a scene where Jackman stabs a tree and out flows the juice of immortality! Which looks suspiciously like cum. Weisz is required mostly to be beatific, yet Jackman’s unruly performance somehow ascends to operatic heights, matching Aronofsky’s lofty themes with vivid romantic fortitude. For every scene that courts ridicule there’s another that, call me crazy, is strangely, profoundly moving. In his desire for everlasting life and love, Tom sacrifices immediacy, and his is a tragedy written in glyphs, not naturalistic gestures.

Because it aspires to fuse images and music into an expression of abstract spiritual and mythical concepts, The Fountain will, for some, invite only mockery and dismissal. But against my more sober criteria, I found myself kind of swept up in it, beguiled by its preposterous beauty and over-earnest transcendentalism, its inarticulate fatalism that finally speaks to our innate sense of eternal return. I can accept or even welcome whatever jabs at its abundant silliness others might make, but I still can’t deny that I left the film feeling eerily connected to that guy sitting cross-legged in his little ball.

The Dying Animal

The final moments of The Wrestler find Mickey Rourke’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson lifting himself off the canvas, crawling to the corner post, climbing wearily atop his makeshift altar, and, to the adoring clamour of his fans, jumping off the top rope into nowhere. That Randy never lands, that the moment we’re left with is one of empty space and suspended breath, speaks to Darren Aronofsky’s shrewdness, his understanding of what this movie’s really about. The basic narrative structure of Robert D. Siegel’s script is rather formulaic, the Sundance-friendly down-and-out redemption tale, if you will, with a number of threadbare contrivances, particularly when dealing with Randy’s attempted reconciliation with his estranged daughter Stephanie, who’s played at too consistently high an emotional pitch by Evan Rachel Wood.

Aronofsky seems aware of the story’s limitations and places his emphasis elsewhere. Coming after the director’s almost oppressively spectacular Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain—a film famous for being booed at the very same festival where The Wrestler later took the top prize—the visual style adopted here seems shockingly low-key, as un-flashy as the wintry Jersey locales. The camerawork, by Maryse Alberti, is hand-held, almost purely observational, willing to doggedly follow its protagonist, a technique that, echoing the Dardenne brothers, leads to an unusual number of shots of the back of Rourke’s head in the opening scenes, as though Aranofsky wants to delay our looking this wounded old animal in the eyes. It’s a brilliant tactic, because this animal, as well as the milieu he moves in, is the true subject of our fascination and our empathy.

While The Wrestler overall feels admirably workmanlike, Rourke’s performance is by contrast a masterwork, though his collaborators deserve credit for helping to cultivate it. On one level the movie’s a sort of documentary, not only about the bizarre world of exhibition wrestling, from the congenial backstage orchestrations of flamboyant combat to the drug culture to enormously entertaining scenes of beefy guys shopping for shit to smack each other with in dollar stores, but about the ways in which our bodies betray us and our movie stars age. Randy the washed-up wrestler who was a star in the 80s is played by Rourke the washed-up actor who was a star, not to mention a pretty brilliant actor, in the 80s. How character and actor align here is transfixing, disarming, and at times affectingly grotesque.

It may sound incongruently highfalutin to speak of a movie as marginal as Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget in the same breath as The Wrestler, but the two films have something remarkable in common: each one allows us to closely view a man’s once beautiful body wearied if not positively ravaged by time and experience. Rourke’s face has been worked on in more ways than one. His frame is engorged strangely. His flesh has assumed the ruddy glow of an over-roasted turkey. Yet through this battered shell an old charisma achingly radiates, as does a desperation that’s almost palpable. I don’t mean in any way to slight Rourke’s performance or label it artless by drawing so much attention to mere presence. On the contrary, everything Rourke brings to the film is in the service of building a complex, highly specific character and telling this particular story.

Likewise, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy, the stripper and single mother with whom Randy attempts to forge a relationship once he realizes that health issues are conspiring to end his career—and, most unnervingly, that he’s utterly alone in the world—is at once vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and sharply defined. In a sense Tomei’s efforts are even more laudable since her character is underdeveloped, a deficiency Aronofsky tries in vain to remedy with a prolonged, purposeless scene of her performing at the club. Tomei’s best moments are the ones devoted toward deepening our sense of Randy’s plight, like the scene in which Randy and Cassidy go to a bar in the afternoon and proudly declare their nostalgia for the hair metal days of their youth. Tomei fearlessly embraces the silliness of this shy bit of courtship, and Rourke, doing a little dance to the canned Ratt in his plaid shirt and duct-taped puffy coat, hair extensions swinging, is absurdly endearing.

But there’s another scene these two share that pretty much announces the most troubling theme of The Wrestler in a manner that’s in perfect sympathy with the characters’ relative lack of sophistication. Cassidy raves to Randy about The Passion of the Christ, about the unholy battery of abuse heaped upon Mel Gibson’s gladiatorial incarnation of Jesus, and Randy, though he hasn’t seen the movie, takes its appeal as a matter of course. Both Cassidy and Randy have devoted their professional lives to the exhibition and exploitation of their flesh, and theirs is a masochistic glory that delivers rewards in diminishing returns.

In the movie’s single funniest, most appalling moment, an ecstatic fan, some kid with no legs, begs Randy to beat his opponent with his artificial limb. Randy shrugs and dutifully complies. It’s proposed then that each of us craves this contact with punishment. Each of us wants to participate in the grinding down of our bodies made into theatre. And this might also explain why so many people who might not normally pay tickets for a wrestling match will part with their cash to see The Wrestler and, in some way that can’t quite be put into words, walk away satisfied, and feeling a little more alive.

TIFF '08: Reeling in the afterglow, with reflections on Che, Mickey Rourke, Hoffman-Kaufman, JCVD and the wiry physique of Ben Kingsley

Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard, and you’re sifting through the ashtrays from smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. I swear I saw a tumbleweed tumble down Bay Street. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja as it turns out.

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, a very hot ticket and the only press and industry screening I couldn't get into for the crowds, the film which a week before enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous considering Aranofsky's history of hyper-cuts and histrionics. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, the physical punishment wrought upon him impressively gruesome, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while ‘Part One,’ covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, ‘Part Two,’ covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean guy weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to becoming the titular protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.

Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies toward al authority figures. Unlike Che or Tony Manero, the film is set in the present and is not especially politicized, though the undercurrent of class difference and the streak of political corruption especially is impressive. The lovers on the run run away from home, only to camp out on the congressman's leaky roof, a delicious testament to the Mexican elite's willful ignorance regarding what goes on right under their own noses. And the public service video the parents watch about how to cope with a runaway child was surely the most entertaining movie within a movie in a festival with a hell of a lot of movies within movies.  

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’ singular cinema.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

Speaking of Charlie Kaufman, I assume I'm not alone among Kaufman sympathizers in feeling I should probably see Synecdoche, NY again before I pursue any elaborate commentary. It's overwhelming,truly bizarre, and defies a glib summation. The film is certainly something you have to admire even when it's grinding you down. In fact, it's actually quite an amazing piece of work, singular in its aggrandizement of self pity, sprawling in its way, with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Kaufman stand-in suffering, often terribly amusingly so, through a life of misery, illness, disappointment and isolation, with only his never-ending play-in-progress, a colossal work of theatre that simulates Hoffman-Kaufman's sad life, as some sort of soul balm. I was perplexed; I was touched; I was entertained; I was bored; I was bummed; I was drained; but I want to see it all again.