Black Swan

Discovering that hidden talent, the improvised malevolent sensual complement to your precise demanding technical expertise, with competitors vindictively waiting in the wings, with a smile and a patronizingly friendly remark, ingratiating, lackadaisical, treacherous, while a mental illness, hitherto concealed and dominated, can no longer be subjugated as pressure reallocates psychological resources to spontaneous professional challenges, and exquisitely chaotic repercussions must be embraced. Mother will learn to adjust. Romance is simply an illusion. He could certainly be more of a prick. It's the seductive consequence of perfection. Darren Aronofsky once again coaches his cast into delivering first rate performances as Natalie Portman internally glides her way through Swan Lake. Intertwining an artist's subjective deconstruction with her universal adherence to and revitalization of performance standards, Black Swan suggests the costs of multidimensional characterizations can indeed be extreme, if not everlasting. Smutty and taciturn and evocative and sinister, paranoia is unleashed and interrogated as Nina Sayers learns to dance the Black Swan. While her paranoia is logical, as it increases in proportion to her responsibility it realistically manifests her worst fears and results in her best performance.

Four Minutes

People born with gifts often don't have an easy time with them, and Chris Kraus's Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) expressly explores the dark side of disenfranchised genius.

Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzprung) is a piano prodigy suffering in a women's prison after taking the murder wrap for her deadbeat boyfriend. Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) is her temporally paralyzed coach, having spent her life teaching piano to incarcerated women in memory of her lesbian lover, who was hung by a piano wire because of her ethnicity during the final days of World War II. Mütze (Sven Pippig) is the iconic lagging student, devoted to his patronage but unable to accept Jenny's privilege, especially after she sends him to the hospital for reconstructive surgery. Revenge, jealousy, cruelty, and loss loom large in this hard-boiled script, where no one is spared from Jenny's wanton precision. Her rage is poignantly juxtaposed with Krüger's crystallized loneliness and Kraus soothes the overt mania by interweaving tender moments from Krüger's youthful affair. Every character executes their designs to the best of their abilities in a convoluted deconstruction of what it means to forgive. Imprisoned lives and disadvantaged dreams attempting to stoically adjust to political postures that consistently crush them, where love is fleetingly permanent and trust a compromised conception. Four Minutes lays on the extremes and some of the situations are slightly far fetched, but within the evocative melodrama Herzprung and Bleibtrau provide powerful portrayals of the brutally alacric midpoint where devotion and corruption collide.

Jenny is given her chance, four minutes for fame, praised by the bourgeoise, arrested through the tradition. The dénouement presents a powerful critique of systematic condemnation while inherent within Jenny's rhythm lies a passionate orchestration of derelict cultural prodigy.