Black Swan Full Free
A psychological thriller set in the world of New York City Ballet, BLACK SWAN stars Natalie Portman as Nina, a featured dancer who finds herself locked in a web of competitive intrigue with a new rival at the company (Mila Kunis). The film takes a thrilling and at times terrifying journey through the psyche of a young ballerina whose starring role as the duplicitous swan queen turns out to be a part for which she becomes frighteningly perfect. BLACK SWAN is the Academy Award® winner for Best Actress, Natalie Portman, and was nominated for 4 more Academy Awards® including Best Picture, and Best Director Darren Aronofsky.
Ambitious New York City ballet dancer Nina lands the lead in 'Swan Lake' but soon thinks her dreams. Black Swan: A Netflix Original. GET A FREE MONTH.
Enter a rival. A new dancer in the company who has black swan wings literally tattooed on her shoulders: Lily, played by a yummily caramel Mila Kunis, whose hair whips the air when she spins. Flaunting an omnisexual pairing of lips that will remind you of eating the screen alive in Gia, Kunis’s Lily has the sweet nasty that Nina needs to tap to find her inner Black Swan. Drinking, drugging, smoking in no-smoking areas, biting into a cheeseburger instead of eating birdseed, partying all night, and carrying a spare pair of panties in her pocketbook (in case the ones she’s wearing get left behind as a souvenir), this ballet babe’s got it all going on. Lily is Nina’s shadow self, her photo negative, the liberated id to her punitive super-ego.
Although the film (which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and knocked people silly) makes a meal out of the dualities and polarities in the Tchaikovsky ballet—good and bad, salvation and damnation, noble renunciation and bedeviled seduction—black and white are not its primary colors. Pink and red are. Princess pink and demon red, to be precise. Pink is the infantilizing color of the dollhouse bedroom where Nina falls asleep to the music-box sounds of Swan Lake on her bedstand (the ringtone on her phone also tinkles the Swan Lake theme, which would drive anyone nuts), fussed over by her mother, played by Barbara Hershey, who’s a staple of the genre: the former dancer who never made it big and lives her thwarted dreams through her daughter, watching over her like a warden. So repressed and high-strung is Nina that the artistic director tells her snidely, “Go home and touch yourself. Live a little.” Setting the bar a little low, aren’t we? But Nina, trained into obedience like so many bunheads, lies in bed and lets her fingers do the walking to her special place as her stuffed animals look on in mute nonjudgment, her lips parting as her breathing becomes breathier, until, aroused at last, she flips over onto her stomach, her firm bottom cat-arched, and when she turns her head—there’s Mom, dozing in a chair in her room!
Poor girl can’t even touch herself in peace. My guest for the Black Swan screening was a ballerina—one of the great Odette/Odiles of our time—whom I invited for her inside-ballet expertise. I glanced sideways at the climax of the scene to gauge her reaction: her jaw had fallen, agog. When that same pink bedroom becomes the site for a pas de deux of ballerina cunnilingus—not something you see every day on-screen—my date clutched my arm in rapt disbelief.
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I don’t think the movie quite tallied with her own Swan Lake preparatory experience. It is when pink darkens to red that Black Swan takes the traditional ballet film and goes hypodermic. From The Red Shoes to The Red Danube (Janet Leigh as a tragic dancer) to the coveted red coat in The Unfinished Dance (where down the trapdoor Karin Booth’s “La Darina” falls), red is the action force, the savage call of nature surging beneath the picture-perfect tulle and the chivalry of romantic ballet. Red lipstick swiped from the dressing room of the company’s senior ballerina (Winona Ryder, who’s a hoot, playing this vicious diva like Susan Hayward in Valley of the Dolls) is what Nina uses to make her mouth wanton and inviting, and when the artistic director accepts its wanton invitation, mashing his mouth to hers, she bites his lip, drawing blood. But it’s mostly Nina’s blood that’s being drawn, squirting out of her unbidden like the blood running down Sissy Spacek’s thighs at the beginning of Carrie, menstrual hysteria vaulting into melodrama. The “ballet meller,” the genre term Adrienne L.
McLean uses in her study Dying Swans and Madmen, has always incorporated a high degree of masochism into its quest for transcendence, the body subjected to a daily martyrdom of pain, blisters, calluses, cruel rebukes, and jarring falls to purge it of everything impeding ethereal ascent into archangel-dom and cascades of flowers at the curtain call. Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night. When Natalie Portman finally takes possession of her dark side (she’s at her most impressive here), her eyes turn devil. Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.