It's about time we got a trailer for "Black Swan," if only because it's one of the most hyped about movies of the awards season. It's opening the Venice Film Festival and is an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival (both of these the trailer tells you upfront), and is sure to be Oscar bait from director Darren Aronofsky. Oh, and it just sounds plain awesome.
Fortunately, the trailer — which hit the web today — looks even better than all the buzz has been making "Black Swan" seem. Natalie Portman's performance is equal parts sympathetic and chilling, and we're glad that for once we can watch a trailer, be intrigued, and have absolutely no idea what's going on.
The basic premise for the movie is that Natalie Portman is a ballerina who is given the role of White Swan in her company's performance of Swan Lake after the lead dancer (Winona Ryder, who you can see briefly at 1:24) is unable to dance. Then a rival ballerina, played by Mila Kunis, comes into the picture, and everything spirals downward after that.
But is Mila's character real, or just a figment of Natalie's paranoia? How much of the trailer is reality, and how much of it a hallucination? And what the hell is going on with Natalie's back? That final image is bone-chilling, of Natalie pulling something out of her splotched back, and then the audience seeing how lost she and her red eyes are. Also, the boys will love all the foreshadowing to the Natalie/Mila sex scene.
When "Black Swan" was first announced, many were comparing it to "Fight Club," which led us to the is-Mila-real-or-not-question, but gave us a different sense of what the movie would be. When we asked Natalie about the comparison while we chatted with her at Comic-Con, she said that "I think of it more as a psychological thriller, like 'Rosemary's Baby' in [terms of] genre, if I had to pick a genre."
With this trailer, we definitely see the comparisons to Roman Polanski's classic, especially with the shots of Natalie attacking the posters and the black monster that is haunting her. Let's just hope that this film ends a little better for her but, judging by that first line in the trailer, it doesn't seem like it.
Were you as impressed by this trailer as we were? Are you excited to see Natalie and Mila step outside their typical roles for this film?
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