Black Swan

Per Italiano
中文版

Natalie Portman won the best actress in the Oscar!

After waited 6 months, finally the film ‘Black Swan’ is on in Italy. Seems like everything happening in the world arrives 6 months later in Italy. But the main problem of watching a film in the cinema is that all film are dubbed in Italian. So if you don’t under stand Italian, you better not go to the cinema. Even though there is a famous dubbing Institute, but for us, cinema maniac, we want original audio. And we do not care if we have to chase the subtitle with the scene, I am sorry, but the original sound is an important part of the film!

Natalie Portman is my favourite actress. Watching the film ‘Black swan’ I really thought that she could be a professional ballet dancer. The truth is that she and Mila, the second leading actress, started training six months before the start of filming in order to attain a body type and muscle tone more similar to those of professional dancers.Portman worked out for five hours a day, doing ballet, cross-training, and swimming. The plot of the film is not complicated; everything revolves around the production of a ballet of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by a prestigious ballet company in New York City. The production requires that the same dancer recites both the innocent White Swan and sensuous Black Swan. A young dancer, Nina (Natalie Portman), seems perfect for the white swan, and Lily (Mila Kunis), has a personality that matches the black swan. When the two compete for parts, Nina finds the dark side of herself.

Aronofsky first discussed with Portman the possibility of a ballet film in 2000, and he found she was interested in playing a ballet dancer. In between of all these years, Aronofshy made another fim ‘The Wrestler’. Don’t know if you have watched it. This film deals with a theme, enough unpopular, the life of a wrestler. Footprint of this film is a sister to the‘Black swan’.Wrestling is a professional consider the lowest art (if they would even call it art) and ballet is the opposite. Director realized that the performers in both of these worlds are similar. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves. Behind the stage, they both have abnormal lives. Using the wordings of Natalie, ‘The ego of the artists is kind of narcissistic, that sort of attraction to yourself and also repulsion with yourself’, it is the contradictory internal that render a difficult life. The performers on the stage are not the only one living in this way, but many other people. How to go over this human weakness? Remember the scene when Nina was dancing on the stage and is transformed slowly into a Black swan, the black feathers getting out from the skin and the wings are growing from the body, could you understand the emotion and obsession? 

When I watch a movie, I have a little mania, I like to look at the story from outside. It is a habit left over from the cinema course that I attended in the University. Although I studied Economics, I skipped nearly 50% of the classes, especially the ‘Hotel Mangament’ the most useless! In that course I missed almost all of the lessons (but now run a bed and breakfast. If only my professor knew ...) rather than listening to the professors who kept repeating the powerpoint notes, I preferred to go to the cinema course. I was so attached to it. My thesis of this course was about analyzing stream of consciousness from the movie ‘Wild strawberries’ of Ingmar Bergman. I was in the library every day for several months, and I enjoyed so much writing it. I think that that was the only moment in my life that I worked so hard for schoolwork. In the end, my thesis got a good grade, and my Professor had even proposed to write a letter of reference to help me to continue studying cinema in the United States.

I never went to the States and I did not continue studying cinema. It is better for me to enjoy a film lying comfortably in the cinema rather than studying one in the library. But, the Italian cinema, please give me back the original sounds!!