Black Swan

Now that's a visceral experience.

I enjoyed 127 Hours. It had a lot going for it. But ultimately it was saying relatively little exceptionally well.

This is a story which throws all the cinematic tricks at you, which makes you follow intensely a character who is in nearly every shot of the movie, who makes you come out feeling as if you've just been through the whole ordeal she has. But also feels as if it will stay with you, because it was about something.

What is that something: obsession, discipline, repression. The ability of your self to put you through intense pain.

That sentence should be the other way round but it feels right that way. I'll try and have a think why that is.

I've just watched this film. Came out pumped, playing The National full blast and going through a buzzing Friday night in Soho as if the people weren't really there.

Although half of me was worried that they were looking me. I felt slightly out of control. A little like Nina in this film.

And it took me almost all the way back to calm down.

It's a film that spends a lot of time looking at pain. The first act feels quite a lot like The Wrestler. The same obsession with bodies which are simultaneously being worshiped and destroyed. That sense that if your body is the vehicle for what you want to do then you make it suffer. You're both completely dependent on your body and yet strangely divorced from it. Able to bring pain upon it so that it does what you want it to do.

But while for Mickey Rourke's character it was only the body that suffered that kind of concerted pain (his mind was taking plenty of hits but not in a controlled or entirely self-inflicted way), Natalie Portman's character is doing the same thing to mind.

I'm not going to give spoilers although to be honest I'm not sure there's much that's not revealed by the trailer. The trailer suggests it's a horror film but while it is undoubtedly horrific in places you realise early on that this is a film in which what she is doing to herself is far more metaphorical. The confusion lies in that, like her, you are unable to distinguish between what is definitely real and what could be but might not be.

After a Red Shoes esque opening with ballet dancers becoming their characters, it takes a surprisingly gritty turn. The handheld cameras, slightly scratchy sound and dull colours of her world with her mum surprised me after the high style of the trailer and I liked it. For a film that is in many ways about suffocation, it lets you breathe at the beginning.

And from that you get a good sense of her character. What's wrong with her is explained quite explicitly by her maestro Vincent Cassel. Her pursuit of perfect technique has left her frigid, solitary, awkward in company. She can play virginial better than anyone else. But she cannot also be sensual, seductive.

We see why. She has an obsessive single mum who feels that she never got to be a great ballerina because she got pregnant and is determined to see her little girl go one better. That means early nights and hard work. But it also most definitely means remaining a little girl. No sex. Just being tucked in in a room full of fluffy teddies. Pinks and whites. Nothing black.

Setting up so heavily the motif of black vs white makes your set design easier. Vincent Cassel's flat is laughable in its obsession with this. But it's a simple effective way of building the idea and letting us know whether Nina is turning black or staying white.

I have a feeling that there are no black faces in this film. There are certainly none among the cast of the ballet. I imagine that's reasonably accurate of the ballet world, moreover I think putting Natalie Portman up against a black character, even a small one, would have distracted it from its motif. It would have complicated the dynamics in a way that would have taken us out of Natalie Portman's increasingly crazed head.

I feel like there's lots more to say but I want to say just two things. Firstly Mila Kunis is very good in a role that I think gets under noticed. She plays two roles really, she's half of Nina's black swan. And she's a girl called Lily. And it's as Lily that I think she does something very important. In a very stylised flick, she plays normal in a way that both feels it but doesn't interrupt the feel of the film. The fact that everytime we see her we're not quite sure whether she is the relatively normal Lily or the black swan helps to keep that edge. But I think it's hard to give off the warmth she does in a film like this and remain likeable. I think it's exactly the kind of performance that makes a film and never gets noticed. It's not as exceptional a piece of work as Natalie Portman's and doesn't the deserve the massive acclaim that Natalie's correctly picking up. But it's the kind of role that makes sure a movie is more than just an actress's tour de force.

Secondly, there's a sex scene in her which really feels dynamic, erotic and absolutely part of it. You don't get many of them. Broadband and the total accessibility of porn has killed off the token soft core scene to fill out a movie but in a way I hoped it would make sex scenes work better because they're no longer partly as use as porn. They can be more erotic than that. Here it works and it works because it's happening to a character's whose head you're inhabiting.

Final note, I watched it in a freezing cinema, (i'm still really freezing) and with a desperate need to go to the toilet through most of it. I think that added to the experience as it made me feel suitably on edge. Also I can't imagine seeing this on a small screen, not least for the surround sound. There are a couple times when it feels like Vincent Cassell is talking behind you and I nearly looked round for his approval. This film really got under my skin.

127 Hours

So a new year. A new attempt at blogging. I'm going to try and review films I see in the cinema but not bother with others to make it more manageable.

127 hours made me think of the Social Network. Both of them have brilliant and i think not sufficiently remarked upon performances which capture brilliant young men and the emotional limits that tend to come with Being one of them.

More importantly make fine, watchable films out of not particularly obvious cinematic ideas. As Simon Beaufoy said in the creative screenwriting magazine interview, 'It's one guy, down a canyon, on his own and he doesn't move. Great cinema.'

And it is. From the exhilarating dynamism of the short first act, through the brilliant first day of him trying to figure out what he'a going to do, the interview where he cracks up pretending to be a chatshow host to the extraordinary scene where he takes the knife to his arm, it is great cinema. I can't imagine being half as effective on the small screen.

It is what I think of as experience cinema. Other good examples include United 93 and Hunger (maybe it should be considered a British specialist genre). There is a conscious effort to try and make you understand what the people on screen are going through. I guess it's kind of a highbrow version of horror. The point is that the glory of it is in its viscerality rather than the scope of the tale or the acuteness of the observations of humanity. It tells us as much about ourselves as any of those would.

But it does it in a way that is definitely cinematic. I consider Hunger and United 93 two of the best films of the last decade but I'm not sure I'd think it if I'd seen them on DVD. They look amazing, mesmerising with strong visuals that require the darkness of a room that gives you nothing else to look at.

And I think crucially it requires surround sound. The sound editing is extraordinary particularly at the end. It fools you into thinking you're seeing things you're not and mean even as you look at away, you're still there, feeling, experiencing.

It has a hallucinatory quality and not all of the 2nd act quite gets you over the fact nothing's happening but it's taken you along far enough that you feel the beats with him. You need to dream and think of other place when he does. You get scared by his hallucinations. And when he gets to cutting, you're ready in the same way he is. Yes it's going to be excruciating but it's time for a heave.

That's not to say watching it is equivalent to cutting your arm off but you follow his emotions well. And like him, when he comes free, you feel in shock.

like social network I'm in awe of the people who made it and remember more than I normally do of a film. And yet, it doesn't really really resonate. There's a tiny bit of 'that was interesting'. Hell of a thing to say about two young men who made a billion and a social phenomenon on the one hand and cut off the other hand. But there you go. I don't think i'm alone in thinking it.