Look, Back in Centre: The wildest 'Black Swan'

This year along with Chris Nolan's most original & dreamy 'Inception', Darren Aronofsky’s 'Black Swan' hits the mark and captures the attention of global cine-goers. This film is a composite poetry of dark, starky truth and swallowed complexities of human nature. A commendable effort to measure the distance from the outer world to inner world. This motion picture gives us a chance to feel the 'perfection'.

'Black Swan' opens with indulging dream sequence, indicating that some of the sequences follow only in the subconscious imagination of Nina, an emotionally charged ballerina played

with bold ferocity by Natalie Portman. Nina desires to own centre stage and, after years of hard punishment-like training, she has the opportunity to star in the double role of the White Swan and Black Swan in a re-visionist staging of 'Swan Lake'. Nina is an instinctive wonder, a sexually innocent, completely dedicated ballerina bent on taking it to the next level by acquiring the lead role in 'Swan Lake'. The character of the White Swan suits her, the lead role requires she also play the Black Swan, a role she can't snag until she travels her dark side. The White Swan is very pure, innocent and virginal, and the Black Swan is a seductress and in-control. It’s a rare and an invisible split to explore all the greys between the white and black. The ballet director (Vincent Cassel) is not convinced she’s capable of justifying the Swan Queen’s dark side, so he chooses another dancer, a cunning and playful rival played by Mila Kunis, to challenge her. As that weren’t suffice, Nina’s also got Beth (Winona Ryder) haunted and disturbed prime ballerina and her over-obsessive former ballerina mom (Barbara Hershey). Naked rivalries, manipulative friendships, a ruining body and an increasingly tenuous trap of reality all pressure Nina on the verge of a breakdown. Her demons are haunting her every effort along with destructive forces. She is scared by her jealous competitor and ill-experienced dancer- Lily, Nina's undying hard work in pure unexplored realm of perfection lead to catastrophe as startling events begin to unfold in her life, making her question her own sanctity in the pursuit of excellence on stage. Her quest ends when she feels a sphere of complete Nirvana. That's the highlight of this film.

Sculpting psychological intricacies to the changing world of an artistically obsessed ballerina, director Darren Aronofsky has followed up his outstanding The Wrestler (2008), Requiem for a dream (2000) & Pi (1998) with another injuring syllabus of physical pain and enduranc

e in the pursuit of a dream. With Natalie Portman dominating the movements and showing a screen presence not seen from her before, this all - enough blood, sweat and tears to touch nicely beyond the ballet audience. With its sexual underlying and a 'fantasy' lesbian love scene between Portman and Kunis, Black Swan offers more than enough to spellbind cinema seekers. It's a powerful and frightening bravura of filmmaking and should do some nice business with descent accolades across the globe.

The director, exercising from a screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andrew Heinz and John Mclaughlin, has crafted a totally original look as a quest for artistic interpretation and performance; in the process he has perceived the not-so-coherent plot of the classic ballet. Portman remarkably showcases the difficult dancing with a confidence and injects it to articulate the confusion and the guilt of a blended young woman. It's a gorgeous mind trip. All these layers, which are the use of a Gothic symbol- the power of the female body.

Portman, showing the benefits of ten months dance training and becomes a leading Oscar contender, but she is accompanied every step by the lively Kunis, a commanding and competent Cassel and a resistive and repulsive Hershey. Ryder is in brief yet effective portrayal of the cheated ballet diva. Background score and re-orchestration of swan theme is top notch as is the extraordinary hand-held camera work of Matthew Libatique, which gives a cinematic reason to breathe for the first time. Black Swan is unpredictable, a piece of sheer brilliance & a thrilling journey to watch. The film takes its visual and thematic authenticity of demons and evils in Nina’s head. Portman, so often required to play a wide-eyed colonial queens, here she has driven and unhinged very believably.

For his part, Aronofsky is inspired from the intense European films and is created a psycho-drama that’s deranged and daring and utterly uncompromising while also making it clear that there’s a strong hand on the throttle. Beneath the eye-boggling cinematography and other cinematic dynamism lurks a grim and intrigue fairy tale about passion, ambition and obsession. This film is a must-watch to introspect ourselves and it floats between our godly constructiveness and destructive evilness. It makes us travel

led beneath our own layers of brains. It's amazing and beautiful, but when you get up close, you will see the breath, the sweat & the blood. It seems there are so many swan feathers flowing in the heads of every thinking individual. Perhaps?!!

Neeraj Joshi,

Ingen Advertising

reachus@ingenads.com

Charles Darwin & the Tree of Life:

“That Mr. Darwin Should have wandered from this broad highway of nature’s work into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil”

“Fails utterly”

“I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. It is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of a mephitic gas”

These are some of the initial reviews which Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory & book “On the origin of species” provoked on its initial publication on 24^th November, 1859.

Produced by BBC to mark the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, with the presenter Sir David Attenborough Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life is a 2009 television docume

ntary that is vividly a catalogue of major scientific events and contributions enhancing the theory of Natural Selection

The one-hour documentary covers a wide range of subjects from Darwin’s visit to Galapagos, his collection and observation of different kinds of species, his reflections over it, formatting a definite theory in 1844 A.D. and patiently waiting for next 14 tiresome years in collecting the mountain of evidence in his theory’s support. The documentary also embarks on the nostalgia of Attenborough, visiting his own college and practical class rooms along with Attenborough’s old footages from his previous LIFE series.

It takes the audience on a tour to Natural History Museum in London, most prestigious of its kind, giving a glimpse of the 20 years of close friendship and then lifelong rivalry between two renowned and scientists of intellectual spectrum of the era, Charles Darwin and Richard Owen, the highest fossil collector of bones and the man behind naming the dinosaurs.

The documentary also covers in context and relation to natural selection some of the important theories and inventions like Marie Curie’s Dating System to calculate

the age of rocks by studying the amount of Uranium in it, Nobel laureates Watson’s and Crick’s Double Helix structure of DNA, Continent Drift theory explaining the same species on continents apart, connecting links between primitive organisms to today’s complex living entities deduced from fossils (archaeopteryx) to present living creatures ( Hoatzin & Platypus ).

The film starts with Attenborough quoting from the Holy Bible, “On the third day, plants were created. On the Fifth day, Fish and birds were created. On sixth day, He created Man. God asked Adam and Eve to leave the Garden and establish their dominance over the fishes of seas and the fowls of land. Thus Holy Bible has given man, a right to exploit the nature.”

The Climax of the film magnificently deals with the idea, ‘All Life is one’, illustrated by creatively imaginative animation suggesting that all life came from a single cell. The film pays a tribute to Charles Darwin by showing the footages of Natural History Museum, where after 150 years, the Statue of Charles Darwin has been relieved of its duty of being seated in a Cafeteria of Museum, idly watching science lovers munching on donuts and grabbing the sips of coffee, and now rightfully being placed at the centre hall of the museum (replacing the statue of his lifelong rival Richard Owen)

Rahul Bhole,

Foreshadow Pictures

swades_wethepeople@yahoo.co.in