Lane vs Portman is not the interesting angle!

As I’m sure you heard, the movie Black Swan was a great success in box offices around the world this spring. Natalie Portman got an Oscar for her portrayal of the tormented ballet dancer Nina, and were praised by many for terrific acting.

Although a chick-fight between these two ladies would have it’s interesting sides, it is not really the relevant part of late days argues…

But there’s also been some controversy. Natalie’s dancing double, the American Ballet Theatre-ballerina Sarah Lane felt snubbed after the movies great success. The studio claims mrs. Portman performed most of her dancing herself, and that’s where Lane reacts. Not only was she not mentioned in Portman’s thank-you speech after getting the Oscars, she feels the studio is deliberately making it appear like her role in the making of the movie was smaller than what she says it was. Several people from the movie-studio, including director Aronofsky and Portman’s husband to-be, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, has backed up Portman, claiming somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of the dancing shots in the movie are indeed Natalie dancing. Lane says only 5 percent of the whole-body shots are Portman.

I think the dispute is interesting, but not from the “did Sarah Lane get the credit she deserves” point of view. Like I wrote in my somewhat disappointed review after seeing the movie, I don’t really care what the studio says about how many of the dancing shots are actually Portman. What I do react to, is that they are making it appear like Natalie Portman was in fact able to learn ballet at a world-class level with only a couple of months training.

Now, let me just make this clear: It might be so that most of the shots are in fact Portman – what do I know? They might be able to use camera angles and special effects and re-takes and God-knows-what to make it appear Portman knows how to dance like a pro. On tape. But get this straight: She don’t!! Claiming anything else is an insult to any ballet-dancer. I don’t care how much of a fantastic actress Portman indeed is. I don’t care if she has a talent for dance. I don’t care if she’s frickin’ Marie Taglioni reborn – no-one learns how to dance ballet at that level in a couple of months.

I’m not going to go into the subject of whether Lane has gotten the attention she deserves from this movie. On the one-side, I never hear about stunt-men and women other than in the credits of the movie, so why should they promote Lane? On the other hand, ballet is an art form, and it is usually well promoted when an actor don’t do their own singing, for example, then why not the dancing double? But honestly, I don’t care too much. If Lane feels she was promised something else than she got, that’s sad, but it’s something she should take up with the studio. What is not ok is the studio claiming Portman is actually able to dance like a pro’ ballerina. Because as I said earlier in my review – if she could do that, she’d be at Covent Garden. And regardless of what some new audience-members seem to think, Portman is not dancing in Swan Lake on-stage anytime soon. Not ever, actually. I’m sorry, Nat, but you are too old now to begin professional training. That’s just a hard fact of life for ballet dancers, and not something a movie-star or a production studio is going to be able to change.

Read the story of Swan Lake, where real ballerinas play