Black Swan: Oh, to be a teenage girl again.

If you were an adolescent, or harbored any hint of adolescent sentiment when Garden State came out, you would've been in love with Natalie Portman. Doesn't matter if you're a boy or a girl. You might even have residual feelings about her from Leon (feelings which would have been disturbingly paedophilic). She was the perfectly quirky girl with fantastic taste in music who any sensible teenage girl wanted to emulate and any teenage boy wanted to sleep with.


In Black Swan, Natalie Portman hits puberty. She goes from being a sweet, innocent ballerina-child to a feisty, dark swan-woman. And because she featured so prominently in our adolescence, every moment of her girl-to-woman (or, white swan to black swan, or, sexually repressed to sexually empowered) transformation tugs at our heartstrings. It brings back memories of shitty teenage poetry and sketches of bleeding angels published on deviantart.com

Mirror, mother, mirror, suicide, self-harm, bulimia, suicide, lesbian experimentation. If you type those words into google images, some pimply fourteen year old girl with raging hormones will pop up. Black Swan has picked the brain of an adolescent girl and pulled out the main bits. Yes, it does get a bit too melodramatic, but Darren Aronofsky executes it with style. Rest assured, it never feels like you're watching America's Next Top Model.

Is it Aronofsky's finest piece of work? If you were never an angsty teenage girl, then probably not. The dialogue was a bit shit and Vincent Cassel was wasted on a flat character. Also, if hard drugs and Jennifer Connelly is more your cup of tea then you'll probably prefer Requiem for a Dream.

Finally, here's a song to help you regress to adolescence.



Look, she even has feathers. Black feathers.