Quote:
Originally Posted by djchameleon
See, the same reason that you enjoyed it is the reason I hated it. I didn't like him trying to play with my mind and jumping all the time between fantasy and reality like he was trying to play a trick on me when I already knew what was going on. The longer and more he did it, the more I just wanted it to end and see the credits roll. I don't mind when certain movies do that but the way he did it in black swan was not desirable to me one bit. I understand what the movie was showcasing about pressure of being in a ballet company and showing the type of dedication the dancers need to have.
I didn't mind the ballet dancing in the movie but at times I was trying to understand what he was looking for in her while she was dancing in practice and trying to accomplish the black swan side of the swan queen. I feel like by the end of the movie I understood ballet dancing a bit more because of her final performance and finally understood what the company director/leader was looking for.
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I can see how you might feel toyed with by the "Black Swan," as if the movie were trying to play with viewers' minds. Yet I don't see any other way to present the subject matter to make it interesting. The movie was trying to show *her* view of reality. If it had been a "documentary" type of movie, then it would have lost its key artistic feature: it was trying to show someone's *mind*.
So, I felt "Black Swan" was simply trying to give me a chance to see the world through another person's eyes rather than fool me with a complicated plot, although I understand your perspective.
I agree with you completely, though, that the movie exaggerated how important a dancer's emoting during her performance is. I also agree, like you said, that her performance at the end shows the difference in "feel" between dancing styles. Yet in real life if I'm sitting many rows away from a ballet, I can't see the dancers' faces and I *might* not strongly notice the difference between someone dancing slightly more tentatively (yet beautifully) and someone dancing more aggressively and confidently. Nor would I care.
Without the assumption that this difference in dancing styles is important, however, the whole premise of the movie would fall apart! So, I was willing to suspend disblief in order to submerge myself in the movie's world. Maybe in real life ballet dancing is like that: companies need flamboyant, gripping stars, hoping to rouse patronage of ballet to try to stay afloat financially, which must often be a struggle.
As an aside, one of the previews in the movie theater was for a Metropolitan opera that was going to be shown soon...in 3D!
Hang on to your hats as a whoosh of 12-year-olds floods the theater for THAT opening!
My thought was: how pathetic. Opera has been reduced to "going 3-D" in movie theaters to try to get people to watch.
No amount of 3-D-ness is going to make up for the fact that I find the plot of most operas (rather like "Black Swan") to be overly melodramatic and the singing style contrived, stilted, and unappealing (with a few exceptions).