The festival may continue until the weekend, but Wednesday was my last day in Toronto. And if I went into the day feeling pretty ragged, I came out of it energized, courtesy of a wildly invigorating movie and a rock icon who's been shaking up the town the last couple of days.
It started with a 9 a.m. screening of “Black Swan,” which I’d managed to miss due to scheduling problems and the lack of a proper credential. Wednesday morning was my last chance – and after three hours sleep, an hour on the sidewalk in a rush line, a big cup of coffee and a scramble for a seat, all I can say is: holy crap.
Whipping up an overheated fever dream about artistic obsession, identity and madness on a grand scale, Darren Aronofsky has ostensibly made a psychological thriller about a fragile ballerina (Natalie Portman) teetering on the verge of insanity as she prepares for a new production of “Swan Lake.”
At the same time, though, he’s made a film that itself teeters on the verge of insanity, with a final half hour – blood and paranoia set to the thundering strains of Tchaikovsky’s familiar music – that approaches the hallucinatory intensity of the most harrowing sequences in the director’s “Requiem for a Dream,” and is a hell of a lot more fun to boot.
It does for (and to) Tchaikovsky what “A Clockwork Orange” did for (and to) Beethoven.
At the same time that Aronofsky uses overly-familiar music but pumps it full of new life, the director take a hoary genre – the backstage melodrama – and makes it weird and fresh and vital. It’s “The Red Shoes,” if those shoes are red because they’re covered in blood. It’s nuts. It’s scary and crazy and scarily, crazily good. I don’t understand the lukewarm comments I overheard from several people around me at the end of the screening; to me, you either embrace “Black Swan” or you run from it screaming.
As for the obvious follow-up question – yeah, but what are its Oscar chances? – my first instinct is to say, who cares? But obviously I do care, and I’d guess that it’s a favorite for a Best Picture nomination (passion counts in the nominating process, and this movie is going to have passionate fans) but a longshot for a win (because in the final voting you need consensus, and it’ll likely scare off a lot of people).
It reminded me of a quote from Bruce Springsteen during his TIFF interview the night before, when he talked about how artists need to be crazy obsessives: “You want to go that one extra step, where somebody could say, ‘Why would he do that?’”
Black Swan is the biggest “why did he do that?” movie I saw at TIFF, and my most exhilarating screening experience of the festival.
By the way, the albino crocodiles in Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” finish a respectable second.
