The Black Swan - Again

Black Swan, Again

While walking along the lake today on my way to downtown Evanston, I listened to The Chicago Way, a podcast hosted by my great friends John Kass and Jeff Carlin. 

You may have listened to The Chicago Way when it was embedded in my recent John Kass News contribution, Toros Aqui, La Fiesta de San Fermin. 

It was a great example of why you should add The Chicago Way to the podcasts you follow. 

Every Chicago Way is a mixture of entertainment, analysis, books, movies, politics and news. The Chicago Way included with Fiesta was an interview with All Pro Safety, Super Bowl Shuffle participant, major financial mover and shaker, and Renaissance man, Gary Fencik. 

Oh, and the guy who ran with the bulls with me on the bloodiest day in the history of Pamplona.

Today’s was about Rocky Wirtz, the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. Great guy. Great Chicagoan. Great man, a good friend of John’s, who recently passed away. 

A force for good in sports, Chicago, and business.

During the podcast John mentioned that his wife loved ballet. It made me think about ballet. How I was introduced to it by my wife, a great ballerina in her youth. A woman who still dances ballet four times a week.

And, my daughter. A professional ballerina. A wonderful dancer. A wonderful mother. Now six months pregnant with her second child. She asked me to babysit her 23 month old daughter this morning…so mom could go to a ballet class.

The comment by John about ballet made me think about ballet for the rest of my walk. 

Memories of ballets attended, recitals attended, Molly’s wonderful ballet teacher Ms. Lilette Rohe. And, the time I asked Ms. Rohe to go with me to see the movie Black Swan.

I reviewed it for The Huffington Post:

BLACK SWAN, AGAIN

I went to see Black Swan the day it opened and didn’t really like it.

But, as the father of a ballerina I wanted to see this movie again, this time with Molly’s ballet teacher of many years. Seeing it with her was a completely different experience.

The first time, by myself, I made mental notes of what I noticed: a bit of the movie, Repulsion, Adrian Lyne-style over the top sexuality, the cold white light of Kubrick, and the difficulty of writing dialogue about complex emotional interactions, ambition, and art.

One of my initial take aways involved thinking about the gap between a professional at anything, and everyone else.

In ballet, you can ask to see a ballerina’s hand position, and know immediately whether she is the real deal or an amateur dancer.

Watching Black Swan, the first time, by myself, I was entertained, but not moved.

This time, as her teacher reacted sitting next to me in the theater, twisting and turning in her seat, with sharp intakes of breaths and heartfelt sighs, as she remembered dancing the role of Odette/Odile 60 years ago, it became one of the most emotional movie experiences of my life.

It was an honor seeing Black Swan with a professional ballerina.

A ballerina who had danced Swan Lake in Paris before the war. 

With her there, Black Swan became more than an entertainment, but a movie about how art is created and the madness of genius.

The score, as you can imagine, is one of the best in memory. Seeing it a second time convinced me that Black Swan is one of the best movies of the year.

This time the movie pulled me into the fable of the swans, into the lives of the dancers in the company, into experiencing vicariously the effort required to stage an opening night of Swan Lake.

The director is not merely filming the performance of a ballet company, instead he uses Natalie Portman, seeking to dance the lead, as the focus of our attention.

A third of the movie seems to be her face in close-up. She is classically beautiful, drawn to all bone and taut skin for this role — riveting.

Her face is so open to expression that she holds our attention — whether as a still lake ruffled by slight wind of emotion, letting us see her fragility, or as an ocean’s surface as the hurricane of her desire and drive for perfection creates gigantic passions and tosses her life this way and that.

The plot follows the company from casting to the opening night of a new version of Swan Lake, a version that is as much Odile as Odette.

Portman, as Odette, resembles a young Audrey Hepburn. As Odile she must allow a darker version of herself to live.

She is convincing both as a fragile ingenue and as a driven termagant.

The director shows us that ballet at this level requires a perfection that is almost inhuman, and, among all things, he shows how Portman’s character lives to be perfect.

At either showing I was not a neutral observer.

My daughter is a ballerina, and I am aware of the effort required for each of her public performances.

Every dancer you see on stage, even in the humblest of companies, has experienced years of discipline, practice, and luck to have made it so far. It is a demanding art form, not for the weak in body or spirit.

Black Swan takes us into the world of ballet with all its split toenails, endless hours at the barre, the fierce competition among a hundred dancers to be the one… the prima ballerina.

The movie brings the consensual hallucination that beautiful young dancers are actually swans to other parts of the film in a way that can disturb. What indeed is real, and what is not, in a ballet performance? The sweat and effort, the hour upon hour of rehearsal, the rivalries and bullying to bring out the best in the principle dancers? Or is ballet’s reality what we the audience see when the curtain goes up and the ballet begins?

Young girls get toe shoes in a first coming of age at ten. They teeter on weak ankles, dreaming of being the Swan Queen.

They dream and practice and dance and are introduced to the most beautiful music in the world as they follow in the literal footsteps of generations of other women.

My daughter’s ballet teacher sitting next to me in the dark, muttered criticisms in French and English of technique and staging that a professional would notice.

She was in tears at moments during the movie for reasons I could only guess at.

Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers is wound so tightly by the ambition to be perfect that being the lead seems her only path to happiness. She discovers that she is to be the Swan Queen in a scene that would pull a stone’s heartstrings. The screen fills with her face in close up. She calls her mother to tell her the incredible news, and she begins to sob with happiness. For a moment the distance from actress to audience vanishes and we live with her, the audience in the movie theater, weeping in relief that all that work, all those hours, all that pain, became worth it.

A profoundly emotional moment that happens in all the best movies.

Perhaps, the ‘why’ of why we go to movies.

The ‘why’, perhaps, of why some things are recognized universally as being beautiful, as many more things are not.

At opening night in Black Swan, the movie, as the familiar overture to Swan Lake begins, we sit expectant, and the curtain rises.

The quest for perfection becomes perfection.

The ballet, viewed by the camera from the wings with the performers nervously waiting to hear their cues, becomes the ideal perspective what it must be like to be in a ballet company.

Experiencing the extraordinary experience of watching Natalie/Nina/Odette/Odile is one to talk about with friends over drinks. A movie to see more than once. A movie to write about in an attempt to encourage everyone to see Black Swan.

The ballet begins: Tchaikovsky’s music fills the theater, the huge screen beckons with its out-sized magic, the swans and dancers become one.

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers. 

Natalie Portman is Odette and Odile.

A great movie.