Electric Eye presents First of the Month Films
We are pleased to welcome local artist KeruBo, who will share her latest music video for the song “You Are Enough,” and participate in a conversation following the film. Of “You Are Enough,” KeruBo writes, “The message is not that we are perfect, nor that we have arrived. Rather, it is that our value precedes our accomplishments. We are human beings before we are human doings.”
The Wrestler whet director Darren Aronofsky’s appetite for sagas of obsessive performers who put their body on the line in the name of show business, but Black Swan takes this idea further and deeper, into more artful, abstract, and terrifying territory. Natalie Portman trained for months to sculpt herself into a believable ballerina and her incredible commitment was duly rewarded with an Oscar win for Best Actress. Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder match her intensity in this hallucinatory meta-adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, filtered through the backstage melodrama of All About Eve and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, with a dose of Polanski’s Repulsion, to boot, leaning into the inherent body horror of ballet.
The story follows Nina (Portman), a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her retired ballerina mother Erica (Hershey) who zealously supports her daughter’s professional ambition. When artistic director Thomas Leroy (Cassel, playing up the George Balanchine lechery) decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Ryder) for the opening production of their new season, Nina is his first choice. As she sinks deeper into the duality of the central role, and is drawn into the web of doppelgänger Lily (Kunis), her identity rapidly, and evocatively, unravels.
