"Black Swan"

First, it's important to note that Black Swans are actually quite common in Australia....

I saw "Black Swan" today (or at least most of it - we arrived late because wrong show times were posted in the Enterprise). I liked the movie, but it's one strange duckling: a complex mix of "Showgirls" (the most-reviled yet brilliant movie of the 90's) and "The Red Shoes" (over-praised, but still wonderful).

Here is an article from Slate wondering if "Black Swan" is camp:

Black Swan, a schizoid piece of high-minded trash that seems to divide audiences on how seriously it is ultimately meant to be taken, raises the interesting question of what it means for camp to fail—keeping in mind that it is, in Sontag's famous formulation, "a sensibility of failed seriousness."

...There's no denying that Black Swan is a riot: Aronofsky piles on the nutty hysterics, and while Portman is obliged to play it straight, the supporting actors make a feast of their hammy roles (Vincent Cassell's curled-lip maestro, Mila Kunis' swaggering bad girl, Barbara Hershey's Kabuki-ghoul stage mother). But the film also illustrates the pitfalls of intentional camp, especially in the hands of someone who thinks of it simply as a lowly form. A signal quality of camp is that it blurs high and low, good and bad. For the creator of conscious camp, this sometimes translates to an optimistic—or, worse still, opportunistic—belief that "bad" can pass for "good," as long as it's tarted up the right way.

Sontag claimed that camp is either "wholly conscious" or "completely naive." Black Swan is both. On one level, Aronofsky relishes the freedom of camp. An all-purpose permission slip, camp excuses the half-baked Freudian clichés that pass for psychology. ... Some might say that Showgirls was a similarly cynical use of camp (others would contend that it was clueless), but in any case, it's possible to view Paul Verhoeven's pointedly vulgar film as a coherent satire: a star-is-born showbiz fable bluntly recast as a tale of prostitution. Tawdry as it is, Black Swan—set at Lincoln Center and not at the Stardust or the Cheetah Strip Club—aims higher than trash. It has grand statements and dark ideas to get across about artistic sacrifice and the price of perfectionism, but the more serious it tries to be, the sillier it gets—an attribute, one might say, of pure camp.

Except that Aronofsky misses one of camp's most essential qualities: its tenderness. There is nothing resembling love in his depiction of dance, which—perhaps by necessity, given the reliance on ballet doubles—is mostly filmed in choppy convulsions, with minimal attention paid to the human form.

...But Aronofsky, to put it bluntly, just loves a freak show. The repulsions of Black Swan—sundry toe and cuticle injuries, plus Hershey gets her fingers slammed in a door and Ryder even stabs her face with a nail file—are in keeping with the grotesque abasements of his other films: the amputation and sex-show horrors of the your-brain-on-drugs extravaganza Requiem for a Dream and the staple-gun and meat-slicer mutilations of the Christ parable The Wrestler.

...The problem with Black Swan is not that it "sees everything in quotation marks." It sees camp itself in quotation marks. A discussion of camp that predates Sontag's by a decade can be found in Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening, in which one gay man introduces another to the pleasure garden of camp. He explains its nuances ("You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it") and distinguishes between Low Camp and High Camp. An example of the former would be a Marlene Dietrich impersonator. Expanding on the latter, he says, "Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love." Not so ballet in Aronofsky's film, and certainly not so the film itself. Turns out all those mirrors are an apt visual metaphor: Black Swan, at most, is camp about camp.

The folks at the Sacramento Bee asked the dancers at the Sacramento Ballet what they thought about the movie:

Isha Lloyd, 21, sitting and stretching next to Cunningham, agreed that the film is "overdone." For instance, she deadpanned, "We don't have webbed toes."

...Ultimately, the Sac Ballet dancers found "Swan" as representative of professional ballet as "Psycho" was of the motel industry. Yet they enjoyed it as a piece of cinema and found nuggets of recognition within the film. A few even said that – if one stretches a bit – the picture might attract new dance fans.

..."What it did showcase is, we are our own worst enemies most of the time," said Sacramento Ballet dancer Christopher Nachtrab, 26. "People can tell us we do something well, or motivate us, but we are so hard on ourselves. (The film) takes it to the extreme level."

...Nor is French actor Vincent Cassel's imperious artistic director a figure the dancers recognize. Calka said he laughed at how "this kind of monarch comes into the room, and the dancers immediately take off their warm-ups" and stand at attention.

"When Carinne and I come in the room, they always keep their leg warmers on," the affable Cunningham said of the Sac Ballet dancers. "And I howled at the part where (the Cassel character) said, 'Those dancers I touch stay for rehearsal!' "