Performance anxiety scores

On the face of it, there isn’t much to link Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The former is a solidly written and acted historical, made in the efficient but unimaginative, workmanlike style that characterises many British period films. The latter is a visually showy, full-blooded melodrama that is almost too imaginative for its own good, careening from psychological thriller to B-movie horror to profound commentary on artistic turmoil. But the two movies do have something in common: both are about people suffering from serious performance anxiety as they prepare to don a role. Colin Firth and Natalie Portman may have been Oscar royalty for a night, but they won the best actor and best actress statuettes for playing a very reluctant (real-life) king and a very paranoid (Swan) queen, respectively. Firth’s Prince Albert, heir to the English crown, is terrified by the demands of public speaking, while Natalie Portman’s Nina is beset by self-doubt, repressed sexuality, and the inability to loosen up, as she rehearses for the lead part in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

At the risk of overreaching, Nina and Bertie are also cowed down by domineering parents, and born into worlds they can't escape from. Bertie’s dad (King George V to you and me) is the sort of hectoring father who could turn any child into a bundle of nerves, let alone an introverted boy saddled with the many demands of being a public figure. Nina’s mom is a gargoyle who has raised her daughter in a cocoon, surrounded her with creepy stuffed toys and made her a channel for the reversal of her own disappointments. Consequently, the world of ballet is as much a part of Nina’s DNA as the monarchy is a part of Albert’s.

Both movies are, therefore, about performers and performing, and one of the things both do well is to place us in the middle of the action. Needless to say, this isn’t a position we are accustomed to being in when it comes to such things as royal speeches or ballet. Whether present in person or watching on a TV screen, we see such “shows” from a comfortable distance, from a position of detachment. But Black Swan contains many handheld camera shots that take us right onto the stage, with the tormented Nina and the other dancers pirouetting around us — so that we get a sense of them as real, vulnerable people with creaking joints and bruised feet, rather than as automatons striking poses on a faraway platform. And one of the few times The King’s Speech does something relatively unconventional with its camera is in a handheld tracking shot that follows Albert into the hall where his coronation ceremony will soon take place. From our vantage point right behind his head, we can feel the full magnitude of what awaits him, and this makes the subsequent point-of-view shots more effective; that portrait of Queen Victoria is frowning at us as much as at him.

“I was perfect,” Nina whispers in the final seconds of Black Swan, though we’ve already seen at what cost this “perfection” has been achieved. The climactic sequence of The King's Speech — with Albert delivering his radio speech to the country on the eve of the Second World War — is more about stiff-upper-lip pragmatism rather than the intensity of a ballet at its crescendo, and of course, Albert’s speech itself is not “perfect” — merely good. The two “theatres” couldn’t be more different, but both end with a sense of affirmation for the “performers”. In that sense, it seems like poetic justice that the acting Oscars went to Firth and Portman.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer