The Splintered Soul in "Black Swan"

Black Swan is an intensely delirious movie that charts a girl’s descent into dark territory.

A ballet company in New York is staging Swan Lake, and its director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) elects to replace Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder) with Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) as the Swan Queen.

Leroy has doubts. He thinks Nina has the perfect technique to be the White Swan, but she is stiff and cold- sexless to be the Black Swan. What follows is Nina’s struggle to be perfect as well for the Black Swan role.

Black Swan’s director Darren Aronofsky and writers Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin expertly draw from literary and cinematic traditions to skillfully depict Nina’s unraveling.

Nina’s interior life resembles Rapunzel’s: She is locked up in the tower by an overbearing Mother Gothel (Barbara Hershey as Erica). They live together, and clearly, Erica supports Nina’s ambitions and dotes on her. But maybe too much: Erica wakes her, feeds her, undresses and dresses her, even taking Nina’s earrings out herself.

Consider an early scene in which Nina talks about having a dream. At first, we assume that she is talking to her mother. Much later, we realize she may have been talking to herself. This is what she does when she is by her lonesome. In the hallways of the theater, she is all by herself many times, even as girls her age talk and laugh among themselves.

In another early scene, mother and daughter regard a fruit. “How pretty,” they say; talking like children. Nina’s bedroom is full of stuffed toys- designed like a child’s room.

Hershey convincingly plays a mother who is by turns sweet and suffocating, jealous and protective. Erica used to be a ballerina herself and while she wants her daughter to realize her dreams, she admits at one point that she thought her daughter cannot handle the pressure. She is also aware that her daughter is unstable, so she wishes Nina would stop harming herself. A nail-clipping scene that will dare you to look away would show how shockingly involved Erica is, and how layered this involvement is. In another scene, Erica urges Nina to have a little cake after Nina cops the plum role. Subsequently, Erica demonstrates how forceful she is whether she wields a knife or a nail clipper.

In this particular shot, the camera is tilted to convey the uneasiness in their relationship. We observe that Erica is lit partially, and we know that she is not all cheer. “Sweet child,” she coos, and we know these words are veiled. While Nina lies on the bed, her mother towers over her, and while the hand touches Nina’s head tenderly, it could very well be pushing the head down. Nina is severely restricted, by herself and her mother, and she has to acknowledge this.

Black Swan’s first crucial plot point is a trade common in fairy tales: a bargain that will cost you. Nina will get to play the Swan Queen if she can show Leroy how to play the Black Swan.

True to the Swan Lake story, Nina (the princess) finds herself tapped by the artistic director (the prince), thereby getting the happiness she seeks. However, she finds the Black Swan role a burden (the curse) because she does not know how to seduce the audience. Her mother (the sorceress) has cloistered her, and therefore crippled her. Lily, another member of the troupe (another swan, Odile from the source) who exudes the wildness and the passion required, threatens to ensnare the director and usurp the Swan Queen role.

Is Lily out to get her? Black Swan toys with us by blurring the lines between the real and the fantastic. It plays in line with the traditions of psychological horror fiction (The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, The Others), in which the ghost may or may not be imagined, and the virginal heroine is repressed and possibly unhinged.

How much of it is delusion? How much is real and how much is imagined? In the scene in which she pleasures herself, she is startled to find her mother sleeping nearby. Is her mother truly in her bedroom, or did Nina conjure her image to repress her erotic feelings? Either way, it adds to the development of the themes of the movie.

Aronofsky also achieves his effects through various strategies. He uses mirrors and hallways and doubles to suggest an identity crisis, the anxiety it brings and a need to deal with it. These characterize free choice and an opportunity to learn and grow. In many scenes, mirrors force Nina to look at who she really is. Hallways represent a period of transition, a journey into the unknown. Additionally, the camera constantly moves and swirls, to indicate that Nina's personality is in flux.

Plus Nina has doubles in her mother, Beth and Lily.

The casting of Ryder, Portman and Kunis is inspired: Ryder as the aging star forced to retire, Portman as the star of the moment and Kunis as the ascendant star. Just like her character, Portman reaches for greatness, and achieves it.

Early in the movie, Leroy recounts the story: A sweet girl finds herself cursed to be a swan, and only true love can set her free. Before a prince can declare his love, the black swan tricks him and seduces him. The white swan kills herself and finds freedom in death.

In the middle of the movie, Nina meets her self- her alter ego, the shadow- in an alley. We know from literary history that meeting your doppelganger is a sure omen of death. Does she die in the end? We cannot say conclusively, but she definitely dies a glorious, symbolic death. She has to accept her shadow- to be uninhibited, to wake up to her flaws, to become a woman.

Black Swan succeeds in exploring parts of Nina’s personality that have been suppressed, and her disintegration after attempting to embody both swans.

Photo from http://columbus.metromix.com/movies/photogallery/black-swan-photos/2179365/photo/2325807

There Will Be Frogs

Magnolia (1999) is a movie about TV people dying of cancer and kid champions in quiz shows, but it is also a movie about adults broken by troubled marriages and adults reeling from childhood memories.

It begins by talking about coincidences: First, a man in Greenberry Hill is murdered by three men named Green, Berry and Hill. Then, a blackjack dealer in a scuba diving suit is found dead hanging on a tree. A few days before his death, he gets into a fistfight with a pilot playing in the casino he is working for. This coincidence pushes the pilot into committing suicide. How he gets involved in the dealer's death, you have to see. 

Another coincidence concerns a teenager trying to take his own life by jumping off their apartment building. He would have lived, but how his parents become responsible for his death- and how he has become their accomplice- has to be seen to be believed.

In the next three hours, we will meet the lonely and the desperate across Paul Thomas Anderson's universe. 

Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) is a smart kid, one of the contestants in the quiz show "What Do Kids Know?" In one episode, he badly needs to go the bathroom, but he is not allowed to. This screws up his game.

Donnie (William H. Macy) was a big winner on the show in the 1960s. Now he is being fired from the department store he is working in. 

The host, Jimmy (Philip Baker Hall), has found out he has cancer. He tries to talk to his daughter Claudia (Melora Walters) about it, but she flies into a rage. In one of her cocaine-sniffing days, she gets a visit from police officer Jim (John C. Reilly).

The show's producer, Earl (Jason Robards), is dying of cancer. Because of his terminal illness, his wife Linda (Julianne Moore) is having a hard time putting herself together. He asks his nurse Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to try to get in touch with his long-lost son TJ (Tom Cruise).

Here in Magnolia we have outcasts and infidels, and we are treated to their awakenings.

Stanley is driven too hard by his father, and in Donnie we see a probable future that awaits him. Donnie wants to get braces he does not really need, and he also wants to get the bartender with braces. He has so much love to give, but there is nobody to receive it- just like Jim. Until Jim meets Claudia, anyway.

Claudia may or may not have been a victim of her father's abuse, and the father himself attempts a last shot at redemption. Earl confesses his sins to Phil, and Linda unravels at seeing him on his deathbed. 

The bravest performance here is that of Tom Cruise. His megastardom is more than toyed with: it is thrown out the window. The first time TJ meets Phil, Hoffman holds the door open but Cruise is kept out of our view. Anderson stills his shot, so for minutes we are looking at the character actor and not the superstar.

Cruise has made a career out of playing the same character: the cocky hotshot who gets his comeuppance and emerges a better man (Days of Thunder, Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, The Last Samurai, Minority Report, etc.). This is still a variation of that same character, with a twist: We are forced to re-evaluate his character as we gradually learn what made him the cocky hotshot that he is. Is it a defense mechanism, a smokescreen? 

Cruise plays a wounded kid, and is one of the children in the movie failed by their parents. These children pay for the sins of their fathers, and what sins they are. These people may have thought they have left their transgressions behind, but the specter of the past will still haunt them.

In the end, we are treated to a sing-along and a most improbable rain, but Anderson moves his camera and his music so quick and so well that we are swept along. Improbable, but these things happen.

Like magic, perhaps?

And the narrator happens to be Ricky Jay.

Shudder at the Infinitely Inferior

After a drinking session with his friends, Tun and his girlfriend Jane hit the road. They are driving through a dark highway when an obscure figure in a dress crosses their way. The car goes to a halt, Jane tries to step out, but Tun dissuades her. They flee, but they return to the scene the next day, only to be told by the traffic police that there is no body or a reported accident. 

Days later, shadows and fogs turn up at their photographs. Tun's drinking buddies commit suicide one by one. How are they related?

The distortions can be explained away as bad film, but what about those taken by Polaroid?

Shutter (2004) is a movie from Thailand that should be included in film syllabi everywhere. The makers have a vision of what they want to say, and they sure know how to say it. See how a ghost pursues Tun on a fire escape ladder, or how a friend of his jumps to his death from a building.

Moreover, this is one movie with no unnecessary shots or scenes. Everything is needed. Yes, even the bathroom scene. It not only leavens the proceedings with humor, but it also makes a sly characterization of the producing country.

Shutter is also laced with spirituality, and I'm not just referring to scenes in the temple or burial beliefs. The concept of justice, of the innocence of children, and the immutability of karma. And love that endures: in Jane's case, and Natre's, and yes, even in the case of Natre's mother.

So who is Natre? If you haven't seen it yet, that you have to find out for yourself.  

Shutter knows its metaphors and places them well. The praying mantis applies not only to Natre, but also to her mother. Because we get to know the mother first, her subplot acts as a foreshadowing of the final reveal.

The twist in the end is also well-earned. The pieces of the puzzle are presented early and when the last piece drops, it's as satisfying a finish as in The Others (2001).

In 2008, Shutter was remade into an American movie, perhaps an inevitability. Starring Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor, it was transported into Japan, and henceforth lost all of its original identity without assuming a new one. It is so faithful to the original that it has become almost a shot by shot remake for a good part of the movie.

They could have done away with a lot of the shots, and to cite one sequence: You remember the one where Tun goes into the dark room and receives a call from the other room? In the remake, they show us the new Jane getting out of the apartment, walking around the city, and actually making the call. Comparing the two movies is a lesson in economy and precision.

Also, the new version presents a more helpless version of Natre in Megumi. Where Natre had tried to resist her tormentors with all her might, Megumi was all weakness. Ben even says that Megumi was the one throwing herself at him; where Tun and Natre did share something special. An Asian latching onto an American; the American forcing himself on her; the Asian girl being vengeful. It's tempting to have a political-sexual reading on this.

The remake was a critical and commercial dud, both in theaters and on video. Now that's the immutability of karma.

Look

In Rear Window, James Stewart plays a photographer confined to a wheelchair because of a broken leg. 

Using binoculars, he spies on his neighbors in his Greenwich Village apartment- initially, to relieve his boredom. He suspects a man across (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife, and he enlists the help of his girlfiend Grace Kelly and his nurse Thelma Ritter to find out what the truth is.

Most of the action takes place in a single room and the rest, in the courtyard and their rear windows, making it one of those exercises in technical showing off.

I'm sorry to report that the movie did not work for me. I know the whole thing was supposed to be an essay in voyeurism, a treatise on marriage even, a Hitchcock classic- but it did not work for me.

I did not look away, and the last few sequences, in which they Kelly and Ritter do the sleuthing for the wheelchair-bound Stewart were riveting. 

But I found myself unable to suspend my disbelief, given the guesses and conclusions he jumps to with little shred of evidence. It looks like the whole enterprise hinges on Jimmy's performance. I did not grow up on Stewart movies, and I know he's one of the biggest movie stars of all time, but the nourishing of his screen image did not unfold before my eyes. 

I hope to like it when I see it again in five years maybe?

Just Another Fairy Tale

In 1993 Jane Campion became the first woman to win the best director prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. She received it for The Piano, her fourth feature.

In the early European colonization in the late 19th century, a Scottish woman named Ada McGrath was sent by her father to the wilds of New Zealand for an arranged marriage to Alisdair Stewart, a man she never met. She brings along with her her dear piano and her illegitimate daughter nine years of age.

Upon arrival, the piano is left on the beach because of expediency and economics.

Holly Hunter plays Ada in a controlled, sustained performance, and Anna Paquin plays her daughter. Paquin's performance is greatly aided by the editor Veronika Jenet. She makes her performance better and more shocking than it actually is. 

The movie itself has been called by a noted reviewer "a highly original fable."

How original is this, really? Let me count the ways.

Like all heroines of the fairy tale, Ada is an orphan. She does not have a mother anymore and her father is in a faraway land.

Like Rapunzel, she is a captive in a tower, locked up by the beast (Stewart). 

Who would rescue her, of course, but the knight in shining armor? Who comes in the form of George Baines (played by Harvey Keitel). We know he is Prince Charming because unlike Stewart, he does not buy any more land than he needs. Unlike the beast, he is one among the natives. 

When Stewart finds out Ada is having an affair, he severs her finger so she can no longer play the piano. Just like Ariel had to give up her voice to be with her man.   

The template for this story, then, is the fairy tale.

It is easy to see how The Piano can be considered a feminist allegory on female expression of the self. Ada chooses Baines not only because he is a strange man and therefore fascinating. She chooses him because he picked up the piano from the beach. He let her play it, and he would let her play any piece she wanted. He allowed her to earn it back.

"To be deaf. Awful, terrible."

"Actually, to tell you the whole truth, Mother says most people speak rubbish and it's not worth the listen."

"Well, that is a strong opinion."

"Aye. It's unholy."

It shows us that the piano had become her voice, and without it she cannot speak. Baines had given her voice back, and he listens to her, allows her to say whatever she'd like.

In a key scene, Stewart forces himself upon Ada and stops to find her speaking, even though her lips are not moving. It becomes clear, then, the many ways we have suppressed the woman's right to speak and be heard. We took their voice away, so they learned to speak in other languages. But if we only listened closely enough, they do have something to say, and it is well worth listening to. 

But when what we see is essentially a fairy tale we've seen many times before, how original does that make it, really?

Big and Monstrous

Los Angeles in 2029 is depleted.

A cyborg is sent back through time to L.A. in 1984 to eliminate Sarah Connor, who will become the mother of the leader of the freedom fighters in the future.

This cyborg looks human, and he disposes everyone who gets in the way. Which is pretty much everyone. 

Kyle Reese, a human soldier, does the time travel as well to try and save her. He explains that where he came from, a nuclear war was waged by computers against the human race. It is his mission to ensure John Connor is born. He has no idea how big the role he is playing.

An action movie, science fiction and also a love story, this movie has terrific action and set pieces, smart and stylish. The Terminator remains one of the most formidable villains ever, one of the crowning accomplishments of Stan Winston. Many of the special effects now look dated, but they are still amazing: products of stop-motion animation and techniques before there was computer-generated imagery. Animatronics, models, miniatures and matte paintings.

Adam Greenberg's photography and Brad Fiedel's score help complete tech noir.

It is easy to underestimate James Cameron's achievement, especially because time has passed. 

At the time, Arnold had yet to earn his box office legs, and Cameron's own Piranha II: The Spawning did not hold promise for him.

The story itself courts turkey territory.

It was not a blockbuster when it was released in theaters, but it was a success in videotape and pay cable.

One of the conceits of the movie is how it used Arnold's features to great effect: the build, the accent, the facial expression all point to the anticipation of- uhm, robotic acting- but here, it is all perfectly fine. He spouts monosyllables and short phrases, no more than 15 lines, and he gets to convey malevolence.

Another is how Cameron has found a neat excuse for brief nudity: the time displacement machine.

Cameron has brought it all together. (Like the Terminator itself, Cameron is exacting and relentless. Legend has it that people who worked under him wore T-shirts that said: "You can't scare me. I work for James Cameron.")

And he likes putting them leading ladies through the wringer. He likes pitting them against big monsters: Here, a murderous machine that's virtually unstoppable. In Aliens, a mother predator, and in Titanic, a sinking ship with all its social conventions.

What does it say about him?

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Country, But...

Based on memoirs published 1946, The Pianist (2002) is about one man's survival amid the dread of Nazi atrocities. It is a sad, understated exploration of the brutality of war, and the dependence of one's fate on good luck and the kindness of strangers. 

Wladyslaw Szpilman is a Jewish pianist in Poland who works in radio. One time he was playing, bombs fall, and invasion gets underway.

As part of the middle class, he initially refuses to be daunted by the German occupation. It seems they would be safe, especially since England and France are going into war. They think they wil prevail, and that all will be right.

But Szpilman's family lose their belongings, and are sent into the ghetto. Through a series of surprising incidents and accidents, he is saved from transport to the death camps and gets involved with the resistance.

What is most remarkable here is the passivity of the movie, even as violence is so casually inflicted.

Roman Polanski's direction and Ronald Harwood' screenplay choose to be straightforward, so Szpilman's story is not told any more nobly than others who had gone through the horrors of war. Often the movies show us heroes, but what we get here is simply a survivor whose narrow escapes have largely depended on chance and the good will of strangers.

Often actors show us the motivations that dictate what the characters will do, but here their lead actor has a role so passive, he is essentially just drifting. Brody turns in a restrained performance, a mix of resignation and quiet defiance. 

In the end, Szpilman gets through the war, but it is hardly a triumph. For the rest of his life, he will get to play the piano among audiences, but he will be utterly alone. 

The war may be a distant country from the past, but those who had gone through it never really got away.

Blown Away

“The 400 Blows,” an idiomatic expression from the French, means “raising hell,” so Roger Ebert says. CineBooks says the expression refers to the farthest point of what anybody could possibly bear.

Francois Truffaut’s first feature, Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), gives us Antoine Doinel at age 12, and you haven’t seen anyone like him. Doinel is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, and his embodiment of the character is so complete, he will haunt you long after the movie has ended. I have seen DiCaprio, O’Neal, Osment, and Paquin, but for the sincerity and the heartbreak, they do not touch Leaud.

Antoine’s mother and stepfather (Albert Remy) pass judgment on him based on surfaces and what other people say.

The teacher (Guy Decombie), for starters, paints him as trouble. One time, Antoine gets caught with a pinup calendar in his hands.

When assigned to write an essay, he pays homage to Balzac with paraphrasing so close, he can only be a plagiarist.

He skips school and to be excused, he claims his mother (Claire Maurier) has died. Guess who turns up to school the next day, and who gets branded a liar.

The mother herself has an affair, and Truffaut shows how hard it is for a child to deal with discovering it by chance. It is painful enough to learn what she is carrying on, but to have to hide it, and to finally get her attention just because she would like you to not speak about it, it is even more painful for Antoine to bear.

When you are only a child and neglected by those you hold dear, is rebellion not a logical reaction?

With a friend, Antoine steals a typewriter. He gets caught, and is detained in a police station. He runs away from home and ends up in a center for juvenile delinquents.

These are events that will make him the person he will be.

Without being sentimental, The 400 Blows manages to be a perceptive study of adolescence.

Four more films of the same actor playing the same character would follow to span 20years. Truffaut himself will go on to make Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (61), and Day for Night (73).

The 400 Blows is the youth movie against which all other youth movies must be measured, and the more you know about the history of the cinema, the more you appreciate how good it is. Some of the techniques Truffaut has employed have become standard by now, but if you place yourself in the world of cinema, this is by 1959 really revolutionary stuff.

For one, they filmed on location, as opposed to productions bound in the studio, which Truffaut had attacked in his 1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.”

For another, here is the final freeze frame to which subsequent movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Thelma and Louise and Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban owe their own final freeze frames.

As he reaches the beach, you have to wonder, Is this liberation for him? Can he even go back?

Between land and the sea, where does he go?

Without a definitive conclusion, Truffaut and Leaud tell us there are no easy answers, and they invite us to think about the uncertainties in life.

As Luck Would Have It

"The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win…or maybe it doesn't, and you lose."

Match Point (2005) is like a less murderous Talented Mr. Ripley, but this time the main character has already reached the station he wants to belong to- through hard work and through perfectly legal means.

In it, Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a retired tennis player who befriends the Hewett family in London by being their tennis instructor. He develops an affair with Nola (Scarlett Johansson), Tom Hewett’s one-time girlfriend, even until he has married into the family. Nola becomes pregnant and she presses Chris to leave his wife.

He has to choose between two women, and he does choose: He resorts to murdering Nola. In the process, director Woody Allen explores the nature of luck, and invites us to ponder the role it plays in our fate.

How does luck happen? Is it simply circumstance, or can it be helped along? When a ring is tossed into the river, Chris hopes that it will bury the evidence; consequently, he cannot be incriminated. Without him knowing it, the ring hits a rail, and it goes back to land, to be picked up by the police. We think he has did himself in, yet it is this very accident that will absolve him. How lucky of him. 

Or is it?

He gets to keep the one thing he has worked his entire life for, but is it worth it? Without passion, without the stirrings that Nola arouses in him, is he fortunate to get away with it?

Luck is a big force in the conduct of our affairs, more than we care to admit. Allen shows us how it can also bring us to ruin. 

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Thelma and Louise (1991)

“I can’t figure out whether these girls are smart, or just real, real lucky.”
“It don’t matter. Brains will only get you so far, and luck always runs out.”

To break the monotony of their lives, Thelma Dickinson (a housewife) and Louise Sawyer (a waitress) decide one weekend to take a short fishing trip.

A man they meet in a bar nearly rapes Thelma (Geena Davis), and Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots him to death. They believe the police are not likely to buy their version of what happened, so they flee. As they head to Mexico, the police give chase. 

Interestingly, Ridley Scott has worked mostly on male-centric movies (Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, American Gangster among other things). There are so many of them, only James Cameron comes close to being so testosteronic.

In a recombinant genre, Scott turns two traditionally-male movie genres into a vehicle for two of the best female performances in the ‘90s. It is at once a road movie and a buddy movie. 

They turn into fugitives from the law: they rob a convenience store, shoot a leering truck driver, and lock a cop in the trunk of his car. Signposts for the buddy action movie, sure, but a reversal of gender roles as well. You might even be reminded that Scott had directed Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

This raises the question of whether this is liberating for women, or yet another form of exploitation. In a key scene, Louise shoots the would-be rapist when he is no longer a threat.

The movie shows their journey to independence and self-assertiveness, culminating in a freeze-frame of the duo’s leap into the Grand Canyon.

The point is not that they make bad choices, but that they do make choices. They realize that there are options available to them, and these options are not to be dictated upon them, especially not by men. These are options for their taking, and they do not need to be alone in their journey. They are freed by their newfound power to assert themselves.

You consider everything that has happened to them, and you’ve got to ask: Do we just chalk it up to bad timing? Bad luck?

Screenwriter Callie Khouri shows what happens to women after years of being dominated and underestimated by men.

Thelma has a verbally abusive husband who cheats, while Louise has been waiting for too long for her musician boyfriend to commit. They decide to have a break, and it makes Thelma nervous. It is telling that when she points out they do not know how to fish, Louise retorts, “Darryl does it. How hard can it be?”

Along the way, we are given clues as to how women should be treated. Louise: “When a woman’s crying like that, she’s not having any fun.”

They achieve freedoms they might have not thought possible. Thelma finally gets to have a sexual experience that is not “completely disgusting,” and it is not with her husband. They may also have led criminal lives, but there will be no surrender: they would not go back to be trapped by the system. You can argue this is payback or a war of hate, but they have taken the matter in their own hands. The final freeze-frame tells us they are not giving up the freedoms they have earned, freedoms that should have been theirs in the first place.

Gender politics aside, Thelma and Louise remains a fun road trip.