Ballet-hoo, times two

Craster: "What happens in the end?"
Lermontov: "Oh, in the end, she dies."

The Red Shoes (1948)

Ballet. Film. Ballet on film. Film on ballet. I indulged a ballet film double-bill recently: the restored 'The Red Shoes' (1948) and 'Black Swan' (2010). One of my all-time favourite films from Powell & Pressburger, and Darren Aronofsky's latest.

As a confluence of art forms, film and dance works. Film allowing movement to be isolated and magnified, viewpoints and angles emphasised. Impossibilities of live choreography are made possible through film editing. An exquisite example is the centrepiece performance in The Red Shoes, those shoes appear magically on the dancer's feet - quicker than greased flip-flops.

A new star given her big chance in a demanding role, in turns inspired and bullied by the genius impresario, a crisis of identity - self (personal happiness) or career (artistic achievement)? - there are clear parallels between the two films. A certain darkness too, a blurring (or a mash-up?) of performance and reality. Obsession, art, love and sacrifice, torment of course. There are also parallels with Aronofsky's The Wrestler, itself about a form of ballet for overweight (or steroid-inflated) men, - doomed trajectory of the curtain call - Natalie Portman as Mickey Rourke still slightly more plausible than Rourke as 'Alfie' Thomas.

The tale within a tale plotting is hackneyed but still powerful - the narrative arc foretold in the fairytale of the internal story. Talking metanarrative: in Black Swan: tragedy and double life of the swan; in The Red Shoes: the non-stop dancer (not a Derek & Clive reference).

In both films, the dancer is pushing herself, to embody the role, her personality torn, in torment; the height of achievement is becoming a physical symbol at the expense of self.

Of the supporting roles, (at least those distinct from the ballerina and her performance) the impresario is the most obvious catalyst for ensuing tragedy. In Black Swan Vincent Cassell is creepy, controlling, eely arrogance in cashmere - but not a scratch on the veneer of the Anton Walbrook archetype (to Walbrook's veneer, Cassell's vaguely venereal). In truth Vince's is a one-note performance - as the only male part it is a role that could easily have veered into pantomime villain even in a film where gender politics isn't in the forefront, so perhaps wisely he downplays, leaving emotional fireworks and sexual intensity to the women. The other antagonists: the controlling mum, twisted by her own career disappointments; the suddenly dispensable washed-up prima ballerina.

In these roles Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder (honeyed figures of decades gone, both) - the casting is almost cruel in its use of them, representatives of older generations of overwrought actresses passed over and embittered.

One of the most enduring charms of The Red Shoes, and something that Black Swan does not attempt to show is the bustle and camraderie of The Company, not just competing egos but the way that ballet/the theatre is a collaborative artform, mirroring film-making. Cogs in the machine are given their dues, layers of the theatrical society are seen making their inputs, artists and craftspeople in a joint venture: art directors, costumiers, set-movers, musicians, composers. The competition between dance and music is flagged up in the first minute, but the real tension comes from the string-pulling power of The Director. This role - a more calculating and catalysing presence than Walbrook portrays in Le Ronde - allows Powell to ally himself with Lermontov - the genius whose will be done, the high-priest for whom sacrifice is made, but the viewer's symphathies are never fully surrendered. Haven't we all really wanted something to be perfect (and damn the consequences)?

Black Swan operates across genres, no bad thing that. In psychological thriller mode, apparent reality and paranoid fantasy interslice, tricks of the mind, an overheated stressed mind, appear more visceral and real, everyday acts acquire a heightened charged feel. There are hints of American Werewolf in London, in moments of transformation/metamorphosis, and more than a whiff of Cronenberg's body-horror. Tonally and visually these moments work, the texture of reality invaded by blips of subverted and twisted images. The sound-editing at times jars though, flagging the slippage into horror too obviously.

What the film lacked was a Ted Danson cameo.

You Ted Danson?
You askin?
I'm askin.
I'm Ted Danson.

That would have been really scary.