'Black Swan' meets 'A Tall Dark Stranger' at the Toronto Film Festival

By Sarah Sluis

FJI contributor Eriba Abeel reports from the Toronto Film Festival.

Well, it's kind of a brand new Toronto Film Festival this year. The whole show, in this chilly, windy 35th edition, has shifted from the tony Yorkville/Bloor Street area to downtown Toronto in the freshly minted Entertainment section. At its axis looms the almost-completed TIFF Bell Lightbox, an impressive glass complex ten ye.ars in the making. This one-stop cinephile's paradise will house screenings, gallery shows, exhibitions, workshops, multi-media events and more. Best of all for the harried journalist, everything, from screenings, to panels, to pressers, will be centralized. You need only to step out of your hotel in the morning and full into the lap of cinema.

Those of us resistant to change approached the relocated fest with trepidation, some of it justified. The temporary venue for screenings is a behemoth called the Scotiabank Theater, a giant concoction of Rubiks cubes on acid. Riding the four-story elevator to the theaters induces nausea and vertigo, not helped by walls with disco balls and wavy lines that appear to undulate. The place is free of anything resembling healthy food and offers only a few bathrooms for upwards of two thousand souls. The 'hood around my hotel is a work in progress, too, featuring Jerk and Swarama joints, a Hooters, mind reader and tattoo parlor.

As for the lineup this year, it contains fewer Must-Sees than in past editions and a dearth of offerings from undisputed masters. Still, by Day 3 I've seen a couple of entertaining and original, if not great films. After

queuing up on on a dizzying ramp, I made it into Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. Since opening Venice the film has generally divided critics. While it's at times preposterous, even laughable - and a few audience members found it risible - Black Swan seduces you with its dark glamor. After The Wrestler, the specialized world evoked here is that of a New York City ballet company, with its driven, competitive ballerinas and exacting ballet master suggestive of George Balanchine. Aronofsky has created resonant parallels between that old warhorse of a ballet, Swan Lake, with its two swan queens - one white and pure, the other dark and wicked - and the ambitions of aspiring prima ballerina Nina (Nathalie Portman) to dance both roles. He's come up with an audacious concept and with only a few missteps Aronofsky thrillingly carries it off.

Virginal, mentally fragile Nina lives with a ferocious "ballet mama" (Barbara Hershey) who projects her own failed dreams of stardom onto her daughter. But Nina's lack of sensuality and mania for perfection shackle her performance of the black swan role, which should sizzle. In an effort to access her inner black swan, Nina dutifully responds to the caresses of ballet master Vincent Cassel, and more ardently to the real or imagined advances of her uninhibited, high-living rival (Mila Kunis). But Nina's ambitions bring her to the brink of madness in a darker, more erotic reprise of The Red Shoes.

To prepare for the role of Nina Nathalie Portman (already tagged as Oscar bait) reportedly studied ballet for ten months. But as a former dancer myself, I can tell you that no actress can create in ten months the body and movement style that dancers shape over ten years. DP Matthew Libatique's camera work cleverly cuts away whenever Nina has to actually dance, rather than just undulate her arms and make like a swan. But even there Portman's merely impersonating a dancer, and not all that convincingly. The great Bolshoi ballerinas had famously superb upper body carriage and hyper-extended arms that few non dancers could reproduce. However, I'm told by my colleagues that only balletomanes will notice. More critically, Portman's limited range as an actress confine her to an expression of pained anxiety.

Vincent Cassel, himself a former dancer, is far more commanding as a creature of the rehearsal hall. He steals every scene in which he appears. As Nina's mom, Barbara Hershey not only goes over the top -- her surgicalized face contributes to the film's ambience of horror. Why do American actresses do this to themselves? Overall, though, Aronofsky has nailed the ballet world, with its paranoia, isolation from the larger community, and near-masochistic physical demands. (Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet once told me that when he was a dancer he was continually in pain.) And Tchaikovsky's familiar, soaring score is of a piece with the film's otherworldly allure of a fairy tale set in New York's Lincoln Center.

With You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen is in terrific form -- in fact, the best in years. With the usual white titles on black, oldie "When You Wish Upon a Star" tinkling on the soundtrack, you relax back in your seat and happily surrender to Woody-land. A voice-over instantly takes charge to relate a story of two London-based couples with adulterous itches. Josh Brolin is bashing away at a new novel

without much success, while wife Naomi Watts works for elegant art gallerist Antonio Banderas. Brolin has the hots for neighboring guitarist Freida Pinto, while Watts covets her boss. The kinks and twists in the characters' destiny amuse without flagging. You will love the scene in which Watts does her damndest to convey her attraction to Banderas, who maddeningly refuses even to acknowledge that she's coming on to him. It's a brilliant new addition to Woody's gallery of miscommunicating couples.

Yet another story concerns a senior, Anthony Hopkins, who has dumped his wife to pursue fitness and who eventually marries a hooker. Easy laughs and Viagra jokes here, but Hopkins lends them gravitas. Of course, this being Woody-land, Hopkins has been prompted to alter his life by a vision of eternity yawning before him, impelling him to live it up NOW. (Cue Larry David in Whatever It Takes who wakes up at night exclaiming "the horror, the horror.") Who but Woody can make fear of death so consistently entertaining? Meanwhile, Hopkins's abandoned wife has fallen prey to a fortune teller who believes in reincarnation. By film's end the lives of the characters are pretty much in a shambles. With one exception: a character who has bought peace and fulfillment by abandoning reason and living entirely in illusion. A sardonic denouement, but delivered with the lightest of touches.