Darren Aronofsky
Il Cigno Nero

I quite clearly remember that the first movie I saw at the cinema was The Little Mermaid in 1990, and in 21 years of frequenting city theaters, multiplexes, film clubs, cinemas, and art house theaters, many times I've gotten up from my seat thinking that I liked the movie a little, fairly, or a lot, but truly rare have been the times I've left the theater overwhelmed by the wonderful certainty of having seen a true, real masterpiece in the history of cinema, one of those that withstands the test of time. In the 2000s, for example, I clearly remember Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, and in these '10s just beginning, I can already count one title: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

As Thomas/Vincent Cassel narrates to the corps de ballet at the beginning of the film, “we all know the story”: Odette is transformed into a swan by a wizard, she can become human only at night and falls in love with Prince Siegfried, who loves her back. However, her evil doppelgänger Odile (the wizard's daughter) deceives the prince and makes him hers; Siegfried realizes the deception and returns to a desperate Odette, defeats the evil wizard, and lives happily ever after with his white swan. In the variation proposed in the film and inspired by The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns, Odette decides to kill herself upon discovering that Siegfried has abandoned her, “and in death finds liberation.” This tragedy in fairy tale form is the starting point used by Tchaikovsky first and then Aronofsky (the first Russian, the second of Russian origin) to weave a story on the theme of duality: the pure Odette and the dark Odile, the opposing and transcendental concepts of good and evil, innocence and malice, are the key used by the musician to express an incredible array of sensations and emotions as rarely remembered in the history of music, and by the director to construct his journey of self-discovery following a purely psychoanalytic path. Almost didactic, like a Freudian essay is the process of sexual awareness undertaken by Nina/Natalie Portman, who, following the stage development model, moves from the oral stage (kiss with Thomas) to the anal one (detachment from the oppressive mother), to the phallic (masturbation), to the latent (friendship with Lilly/Mila Kunis), and finally to the genital (sexual relation with Lilly). And almost didactic, like a Kandinskian essay the continuous use of juxtaposed black and white colors broken only by the two tones of blush pink for Nina and earth brown for Lilly (two colors of the flesh). All this inevitably harkens back to another masterpiece of crystal-clear Freudian clarity, Psycho: Bates' house features a large bedroom for the mother (superego), Norman's little room (ego), and the basement with the repressed secret (unconscious). And in Psycho as in Black Swan, stuffed animals in the protagonist's room, an oppressive mother, a bathroom where blood flows, and a person who has another self inside. Hitchcockian structural clarity is just one of the many citations in the film: there are many visual ones as well, from the tracking shots with the camera behind the protagonist as in Elephant to the terrifying faces in the mirrors as in Deep Red, Black Swan is also a catalog of visual motifs from the past and creator of a new anxiety linked to nails, skin, and many moments of minimal blood and maximal repulsion; a continuous atmosphere of anxiety supported by the excellent performance of the cast and especially Natalie Portman, outstanding. A separate chapter is deserved by the music: British Clint Mansell, a regular collaborator of Aronofsky, has extracted from Tchaikovsky's ingenious and deeply moving score a soundtrack where subtle reminders of the original ballet continually resurface, yet it is never heard until the end, when Nina finally debuts in her role, resulting in one of the most exciting, empathetic, powerful, and beautiful endings that cinema, recent and otherwise, remembers. Black Swan is a masterpiece based on a masterpiece.

If Oscar Wilde is right in saying in his De Profundis that a man's entire life and work is foreseen and anticipated by himself before it even occurs, that is, if it is true that each of us does nothing but live and work always on the same strong ideas, if each of us as an artist does nothing but repeat ourselves with increasingly refined filters and modalities (or, as they say for directors, if they always make the same film), then Aronofsky, retrieving the psychological elements of his previous films and immersing them in a context of enormous beauty like the world of ballet, reaches with this film such a high level, so tending towards perfection as to represent a manifesto for the universal themes of madness, obsession, monomania to achieve a goal beyond their reach.