The Black Swan

" The Black Swan"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

Is this a horror movie? Or just a dark sexy movie? I loved this movie – saw it twice and still found it very freakyt. It is a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

But being different isn't the same thing as being good. But in this case it is. Watching this willfully deranged quasi-horrorfest, I wanted to crawl under my seat several times while watching this movie.

The Powell-Pressburger "Red Shoes" (1948) inspired an entire generation of girls to become ballerinas. "Black Swan" is likely to have the opposite effect. Scrape off the film's heebie-jeebie folderol and you're left with this: Become a dancer, go mad.

Portman's Nina, a virginal young thing with a benevolent-despot stage mom (Barbara Hershey) and a mania for perfection, lands the role of the Swan Queen in an upcoming, daringly "revisionist" (i.e., sexy) production of "Swan Lake." The problem is, Nina must also dance the ballet's bewitching Black Swan.

Because the stud-Svengali artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is skeptical that Nina can make it over to the dark side, he brings in a rival dancer, the sexed-up Lily (Mila Kunis), to act as both goad and back-up. (She also becomes Nina's fantasy lover, or maybe it's just another one of those now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dream sequences.)

Working from a script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, Aronofsky plays up the thematic parallels between Nina's dissolution and the narrative of "Swan Lake." He dresses Nina in white and her co-players in dark colors, just in case we missed the point.

He blurs the line from the get-go between her reality and her rapidly accelerating fearful fantasies. A split toenail in this movie is never just a split toenail. It's a portal into horror, or, to be more specific, artsy B-movie horror shenanigans.

The technique of visually connecting a crazy person's interior and exterior worlds has been in the movies since at least "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920). It was around the time Nina sprouted feathers that I decided "Black Swan" was either a vast put-on (too obvious) or vastly pretentious (more likely). Many moviegoers, especially high-toned ones, will believe otherwise. For them, anything this feverishly absurd and obviously made by smart people must be a work of art.

You can pick out all the references in this movie to other movies, not only "Red Shoes" and "Caligari," but also, for starters, "Phantom of the Opera," "All About Eve," "Repulsion," and Aronofsky's own dreamy-druggy freak show "Requiem for a Dream." In the end, however, "Black Swan" has the distinction of being its own beast. (Rated R for strong sexual content, violent images, language, and drug use.)

Now the sex scenes in this movie are very hot, the dancing first-rate and by the end of the movie you’ll be wanting to see it again – hopefully it will all come together the second time around you’ll be saying to yourself.

A horror-fest? Yes – a sex-fest – yes – a drama? Once again yes.