Black Swan swoops down on TIFF

Why I am pulling quotes from Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir two days in a row? Firstly, he’s one of few name-brand critics in Toronto filing his instantaneous reaction; and secondly, he’s writing things I like to hear. O’Hehir says Black Swan is “outlandish and melodramatic and spectacular.”

Set entirely within the cloistered, sadomasochistic world of ballet, it definitely won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, and those who don’t like it can make a great show of being populists bored to tears by the tedious self-involvement of high culture.

But that will not be me. I’m here to tell you that I found “Black Swan’s” tale of madness, music and sexual repression utterly overpowering from the first few frames of the film. I forgot about the notebook in my lap and totally abandoned that sense I sometimes get that I’m trying to write the review in my head before the movie’s over…

I’ll leave it to genuine balletomanes to judge the quality of Portman’s dancing, but I can tell you that she’s had solid training and that Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique make her look sensational. Or maybe “sensational” isn’t the right word; “Black Swan” features some of the most magnificent ballet sequences ever created for cinema…

It’s a terrible clich√© to say that a movie about artistic creation is itself an autobiography of its creator, but this is one of those rare movies in which director, actor, character and story all fuse into a big and powerful allegorical somethingness. “Black Swan” certainly has its flaws — it’s overcooked, and implausible in places — but I don’t care. It’s a magnificent blend of pop and art cinema, the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for from both Portman and Aronofsky, and an instant classic that people will be arguing about all winter.

Lou Lumenick, The New York Post:

“The Red Shoes” meets “All About Eve” in Darren Aronof sky’s very scary and super-sexy “Black Swan,” a psychological thriller set in NYC’s ballet world that may put Natalie Portman at the forefront of Oscar’s Best Actress race.

Portman’s bravura peformance as Nina, a virginal ballerina whose quest for perfection pushes her toward the brink of madness, was the talk of the Toronto International Film Festival after its first press screening yesterday.

“Black Swan” is a gorgeous-looking picture that builds almost unbearable nail-biting suspense as it hurtles toward an emotionally shattering climax.

Katey Rich, Cinemablend, says “Black Swan is a stunner.”

Audaciously weird and scary and go-nuts psychotic, Black Swan is, by any measure, a tour de force. It grabs you in from the first moment, a dream sequence ballet filmed with spinning camera and visceral sound effects and blaring classical music, establishing with force a world in which frailty and strength must exist within the same dancer, and where the only thing between grace and the breaking point are a pair of thin silk shoes. A highly competitive ballet company may seem an odd location for the director of muscular, masculine films like The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, but Aronofsky brings all of his obsessions here, from the intersection of the physical body and art to parental relationships with the power to destroy. He’s also made a damn effective horror movie, and wrung a career-best performance from Natalie Portman. The list of superlatives here could well go on forever.

…Portman sells every inch of the character, and makes a convincing ballerina to boot, but Aronofsky and his writers (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin) brilliantly balance the escalating horror and the plight of a real character struggling with her grip on reality. Portman is in nearly every frame but the rest of the cast is up to her level, particularly an unhinged Winona Ryder as the recently deposed veteran ballerina, and Hershey, who is practically a villain herself as the mother who lives life entirely through her infantilized daughter.