by Steve Dollar

"The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness." - Mick Jagger, Performance

Everybody"s Lucifer had it right. The swivel-hipped satyr could as easily been giving stage notes to Nina Sayers, Natalie Portman"s bedeviled ballerina, as she struggles to embrace the psyche-splintering demands of her performance in Swan Lake-which includes a dual role as the Black Swan, the Jungian alter-ego of the title figure, and the thematic engine of Darren Aronofsky"s film of the same name. The dynamics were a bit different in Performance, the 1968 Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film in which Jagger"s hermetic rock god Turner plays mind games with a mob enforcer (James Fox) on the run, who has tumbled into his Dionysian lair. There, sexy druggy things ensue, before someone dies and Turner may or may not have become a doppelgangster.

Seeing as Performance hit screens in 1970, when audiences were as likely to be stoned or munching blotter acid as they were popcorn, its hallucinatory style-synonymous with Roeg-is practically inchoate in comparison to Aronofsky"s carefully attenuated orchestration of Nina"s mental meltdown in Black Swan. That"s one of the new film"s strengths, even as he taps into the cinema of insanity, doubles, shattered mirrors, bent psychologies, and edgy sexuality that includes films like Persona and Mulholland Dr., not to mention freaked-out classics of mental disintegration like Repulsion, and the thriller continuum that runs from Hitchcock to Cronenberg. Aronofsky keeps an impressively tight focus on the core of his story before it gradually spins toward a tripped-out climax that rates as the most exhilarating screen moment of the year.

Posted by: ahillis    Source

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