7 photosKeira Knightley

The cast and material both look great. Mortensen plays Freud and Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung. Keira Knightley plays the sexed-up looney bird he plows and Vincent Cassel rocks a beard.

This demo reel reveals many of the techniques that went into makin Black Swan such an understated yet striking film. Reflections of cameramen were removed from dance studi mirrors, lots of “head replacements” took place, and animated tattoos were placed on Mila Kunis‘ back while she “kissed” Ms. Portman. Also, Vincent Cassel died 17 days into filming and they had to use a CGI representation of him. Just kidding. I think. (/Film)

The ad is set to premiere in Europe in March, and the US a few months after that. (via The Playlist)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis

Synopsis: A thriller that focuses in on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and a rival.

Genre: Drama / Thriller

Release Date: December 1, 2010

Darren Aronofsky would like you to see his new film, Black Swan, as a companion to his previous Oscar nominated The wrestler. Maybe they’ll show as a double feature. Black Swan is about a ballet dancer (Natalie Portman) losing her grip with reality, and The Wrestler was about a steroid monster trying to make up with his daughter. You see the similarities.

“I don’t really think there’s that much difference,” Aranofsky said. “I don’t think it’s that much of a big deal. I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful they can connect. I keep saying that it doesn’t matter if you’re an aging fifty something year old wrestler at the end of his career or an ambitious twenty something year old ballet dancer. If they’re truthful to who they are and they’re expressing something real then audiences will connect. That’s always been the promise of cinema and that’s why we can see a film about a seven year old girl in Iran or an immortal superhero in America. It doesn’t matter as long as they’re truthful.”

Also, they’re both kind of the ultimate sports movies The wrestler took staples in his chest and jacked up his heart on steroids. The dancer breaks her toes and breaks out in hives from all the hours of training. Aronofsky portrayed the dance world as starkly as he did the ring.

“The whole cinema verite handheld approach to The Wrestler was a big risk to bring over into this ballet film because I had never seen a kind of suspenseful film that had this kind of handheld camera and I didn’t know if it would work. I was always really worried that if in a really scary scene everyone would wonder why Natalie wouldn’t turn to the cameraman and go, ‘Help’, or something. So I didn’t know if it was going to work, but then we sort of went, ‘F*ck it. Lets just go for it because it’s never been done,’ and I really enjoyed the camera moving.”

The wrestler may have had some real life issues, but the dancer gets the full Aronofsky treatment. He goes all Requiem for a Dream on her. “Having a man hold the camera I could really move the camera in ways that you can’t in any other way. The result of that is that the first third of the film has a very different feel than the last half of the film because it’s got this very naturalistic feel which I think actually is kind of cool because it makes people feel like they’re watching a very different type of movie that can’t ever freak out like the way that it freaks out. Yet, it gives you that kind of immediacy of being in that other moment and being in this other world with little hints like she’s peeling her finger and things are going to get really freaked out. In general it just feels like a documentary in the beginning before it freaks out. So it kind of worked out for us.

Black Swan freaks out theaters Dec. 3.

Black Swan is some classic Darren Aronofsky crazy. If you missed the high style of Requiem for a Dream or the abstract interpretive level of The Fountain, they’re back. Yet it’s also set in a physical world like The Wrestler, so maybe I can work Pi into this comparison somehow too.

Ballet ingénue Nina (Natalie Portman) gets a big break when director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassell) gets tired of his old star, Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder). Leroy forces Beth to retire at the ripe old age of 30-something, and he pushes Nina to give a star making performance in “Swan Lake.” A new ballerina, Lily (Mila Kunis), seems like a potential rival to Nina. Then Nina starts having visions of gore and sex and just general creepiness.

The world of ballet is introduced with perfect visual storytelling. A montage of feet cracking and shoe prepping is like a sports movie. We’re in the world, enough to understand it without any blatant “this is how ballet works.”

Lily’s so rogue she seems like the ballet badass. She shows up late but has so much confidence she pulls it off. What we see of her moves are so sensual, it does seem like that’s the way the ballet industry should go. Lily is just passion, raw and natural. Kunis pulls it off even though we hardly see her actually dance.

Nina’s problem is she’s strictly performing. It’s kind of funny that Leroy is complaining she’s stuck in her structure of serious innocence. He’s basically saying, “Stop giving a Natalie Portman performance.” More than any of her performances since The Professional, we really see Portman transform into a completely different physicality by the end of the movie.

Then it goes completely off the rails. Little flourishes of sound make regular scenes shriek with intensity. Little visual effects twist regular scenes until they’re just not quite right. The effects are designed to look just a tad off enough that it freaks you out. I saw one spotty CGI tweak, but every film is allowed one.

Nina’s mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), is just off enough to be totally crazy. She makes small gestures, but they’re so wrong. Drastic gestures appear out of nowhere. There’s some gore that’s grosser than anything in Saw because it’s intimate. Leroy uses sexual manipulation as artistic direction, and damned if it doesn’t make sense as a directorial tactic.

This is one of those pure crazy movies like Jacob’s Ladder. You don’t know what you’re going to see next, you don’t know what’s real and just getting to the end is exhausting. The film leaves you drained, which is a wonderful experience to have at the movies.