The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese)

two people consuming the fruits of forbidden love.

Film Review Archive (date seen: January 4, 2011)

Once again, Scorsese leads us through places almost bound with secrecy, wrapped in customs, littered with hidden scandals, and the people that inhabits them whose mastery of conversations, socialization, and even dining were too great in its artificiality that they almost looked like performance acts. No, it's not the Italian-flavored crimeland we're talking about here, but 19th century New York where high society dwells on everything material and excessive, where moral righteousness is not a code to follow but more of a trend to fashionably don.

At first, I had doubts if Scorsese's known visual compositions really belong to such a type of film set in an era of restraint and conservatism. But with his combination of attention to details and an inclined exploratory viewpoint of the social class' amoral gutters amidst its elegant vanity, he used a distinct style (at times, darkening everything on screen but a smooth-edged circle to contain the main subjects, or even letting a character face the camera and speak of a potentially saddening letter with great joy and eagerness) to really fit the film's grasp of irony. Those who accuse Daniel Day-Lewis as a scenery-chewing hack will be utterly disproved in his performance in this film, using the fine attitudes of an obligatory gentleman to depict the numbered movements of an 1870's society male while maintaining his attachment with controlled subtlety. With this type of acting approach, Day-Lewis has able to internalize and show on screen his character Newland Archer's episodic implosions about his clamor for freeing himself from the bondage of his class' norms about love.

Though "The Age of Innocence" had its moments of beautifying high society's excessive lifestyles, Martin Scorsese and Edith Wharton's novel (from which the film was adapted) have successfully portrayed an escapist love surrounded by eyes of the self-righteous ones, the impossibility of its fruition, and the beauty of its acceptance. Living the life of grandeur may be like lying in a bed of roses, but the occasional thorns sure do hurt.

FINAL RATING

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

The Swan Lake acid.

After his masterpiece "The Wrestler", Darren Aronofsky, arguably the best director working today, had, in some ways, combined the paranoiac overtones of "Pi" and the relentless nerve-wrecking style of "Requiem for a Dream" to create "Black Swan", an unsettling film experience exploring the dark psycho-sexual journey of a woman consumed by theater and sexual repression.

Now we've all seen the more abhorring side behind the theater curtains via Joseph Mankiewicz's "All About Eve", a classic film about ambition and fame and the unthinkable ways one would do just to attain them. But "Black Swan" departed itself from the common direction of being a thematic typecast, tackling instead the individualistic theme about a person's self-triggered cerebral destruction (and inner metamorphosis) heightened and brought to the extremes by the clamor for stage perfection. Natalie Portman looked right as Nina, a consummate ballerina seemingly ideal for the part of the Swan Queen but lacking the inner motivations of emotionally letting go to suit it.

Though her physique is naturally thin, Ms. Portman's embodiment of a ballet dancer's body (resembling an alarming look of the pre-anorexic stage) was very impressive. She also did great on the acting department, maintaining a certain look of naivety and disorientation to put a perfect contrast to her numerous dances that require every facial expressions but that. Vincent Cassel of the "Irreversible" fame (more like infamy) was outstanding as the stage director, and Mila Kunis, aside from being almost visually perfect, was also good as that 'other' Swan Queen aspirant that was also the non-existent cause of Nina's jealousy, mania and desire.

We always hear about the line "Life imitates Art" and vice-versa, but "Black Swan", chillingly enhanced by the atmospheric Clint Mansell score, takes us through the downside territories of that famous phrase back and forth, puts us through excruciating mind trips, until it places us into an abstract perspective of the two being one and the same. Forget about theatrical choreography and appropriate movements. When the grayish psyche finally interferes, nothing, even the alluring bright lights of the center stage, would really matter and perpetual distortion as constant reality will surely take over.

FINAL RATING