Darren Aronofsky
Il Cigno Nero

This work will be remembered for being the ultimate artistic consecration of the excellent Natalie Portman, for giving her (with all statistical probability) her first Oscar award, and for projecting her into the Hollywood star Olympus as one of those 50s/60s divas who, from now on, will be able to choose only engaged and substantial scripts. On one hand, it is right to be so; indeed, she is stunning and deserves what is happening to her. But it would also be just as right to remember this film for what it indeed is.

The inevitable premise, for the writer, is that it is not an easy film to review without saying too much about the story and without letting the reader understand the exact perspective from which it should be approached. Because "Black Swan" is not the story of a dancer who performs Swan Lake but is the story of a "mind," it is the story of a descent into the inferno of the human psyche without mincing words or many plot twists. We are what we do, and if what we do is not perfect, we are nothing; we have no other reason to tread this earth and will never reach the serenity that every human being deserves. To do what we love requires character; it's not enough just to be good; it requires determination. But each one is who they are, and each one knows their limits. Everyone knows that inside themselves there are two people, and both halves do not always communicate peacefully with each other. Sometimes, in wanting and reaching perfection, the human spirit is torn, and no rationality can hold it. Sometimes the white swan and the black swan are not just a metaphor for good and evil, but simply of what one is and what, of oneself, is not yet known: sometimes this discovery is too devastating, especially for those innocent souls, still childlike, still too immature for life. Sometimes this discovery is the worst of nightmares, other times it's a pathology.

"Black Swan" is all of this, described with extreme violence and pathos. As if in "Taxi Driver," Scorsese had shown us the madness of the protagonist not "externally," but directly with the internal eye of his mind.

Aronofsky follows nonetheless a linear path, and what he wants is to take the viewer into the same hell as the protagonist and to be as effective as possible, he uses an adequate language: he uses the portrayal of madness and does so with all the means cinema has given him. The deliberately gritty and grainy photography makes the viewer uncomfortable, and the deviation into metaphysical horror does not seem like an end in itself but as a narrative necessity, as much "unpleasant" as it is fascinating. What impresses the most in viewing the film is the contrast between the ethereal beauty of art (the dance scenes are very beautiful) and the rawness (sometimes really strong) of some sequences, up to the final metamorphosis, in one of the best-achieved scenes that, personally, I have seen in recent years. The release of the Black Swan from Nina's heart comes to the end, and only then, once free from her demons, does she find perfection.

The greatest merit of this film is to make us understand how much today's cinema still has to offer, not for the originality of the story itself, but for the extraordinary ability to use images to narrate what, in a different way, could not have been told.