With Black Swan Darren Aronofsky has definitely become one of the hottest and interesting directors in Hollywood. Since his first feature film P in 1998, a delirious journey into a mad mathematician’s mind, the talented director has brought on the screen some of the most intense, touching and psychologically disturbing movies of the last decade.
Black Swan clearly borrows elements from two of his previous films, The Wrestler and 
Requiem for a Dream, but it presents them in a completely different context and in a more sophisticated way. The camera that was always following Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, it’s now following closely Natalie Portman, without giving her room to breathe and keeping the audience on the edge of their emotions, to make them feel what she feels. The relationship mother-son so crucially poignant and surreally absurd in Requiem, it has now become mother-daughter and it is fully loaded with paranoia, obsession and suppressed feelings.
As Nina, the virginal and utterly committed ballerina who slowly loses her grip on her way to perfection, Natalie Portman gives probably the best performance of her life, perfectly fit, overly skinny, and beautifully directed by Aronofsky’s touch. Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel play Lily – the careless and sensual stage alternate of Nina – and Thomas Leroy – the sleazy and harsh artistic director of the ballet company – the characters who unhinge Nina with their true and passionate reactions to life.
Thanks to a tight rhythm, a sumptuous soundtrack – the real Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, but cleverly contaminated and mixed with modern sounds – and excruciatingly intense sequences, Black Swan is the quintessence of paranoia (with hallucinations too).
Trying to reach perfection might lead to delusion, but when you feel perfect no one can take that feeling away.
