Hye Rim Lee: Swan Lake

Piotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876) is a tragedy. A young prince, Siegfried, needs to marry to assume a vacant throne. His mother insists he picks someone, anyone. Siegfried is unenthusiastic until he meets Odette. Odette however is trapped by the magician Rothbart, condemned to spend her days as a swan and her fleeting nights in human form. This spell, though, can be broken by true love. Enthralled, Siegfried duly pronounces his eternal devotion and everything seems set for a happy ending.

Rothbart, however, has other ideas. At the ball where Siegfried intends to declare his love for Odette, Rothbart arrives with his daughter, Odille, magically transformed to appear as Odette. The prince falls for it and at Rothbart’s insistence declares his love for her there and then. This, of course, breaks Odette’s heart. True love no more. Rothbart’s spell looks set to hold sway forever until Siegfried rushes to Odette to convince her that he simply fell for a ruse and she is the one he wants to spend eternity with. So he drowns himself in an act of remorse that somehow comprises the spell.⁽¹⁾ True love it is, but a tainted love. Odette is free of Rothbart but condemned to live as a swan. The swan maidens dance their tragic dance. It’s the grand finale of the corps de ballet. Everyone knows the theme, the ear worm. It ushers pathos.

Hye Rim Lee’s Swan Lake is nothing like the original. It starts with two swans dancing in that iconic visage of love. Two rubber-necking swans making a heart shape. It’s pathos writ large. It’s cliché, it’s banality. Hye Rim Lee’s Swan Lake is interrupted by a large black peacock that spreads its tail and declares its intent. Menace. The banal love scene is interrupted. Abruptly. Like Reza Negarestrani’s depiction of a sentient oil,⁽²⁾ this peacock is similarly a black tumult that pervasively and innocuously invades everything. He heartlessly spreads his skein, blanketing the scene. The peacock’s malevolence sends the swans spinning like little tops. They spin off out of control. Overwhelmed by the black ooze of the Peacock’s sheer bravado. To make matters worse the peacock stomps on one of the swans. The swan crumples. A yellow crown is all that’s left. You see it only when he’s dead. Suddenly it’s obvious: he’s the desiring prince, Rothbart is the peacock, the remaining swan is Odette. There’s no deceit. Just pure violence. It gushes over the scene crushing everything. Shattering it. The jewel box scene of banal love splinters into shards. Hye Rim Lee thrusts us into the void. Te kore. All that remains is the hard-edge jewels of the crown. Spinning in this empty black, non-emotive space. Two jewel-like praying mantises float in the void offering a symbology that might elucidate the scene.

Perhaps you can say Hye Rim Lee condenses Swan Lake. She does away with Odile. With the deceit. Focuses on the masculine need to control. The peacock’s viscous disembowelment of true love. But she also does something else too. The opening scenes are murky, hazy even. You don’t notice it at first, but it’s thrown into relief by the curtain interludes. The film is broken into sections by the descending curtain just like the ballet. Only, Hye Rim Lee’s curtains are luminous. They’re golden. They fold and waver in high definition. They’re mesmerising but they’re also there to signal how hazy and out of focus the preceding scene was. The swan’s balletic dance. Their love dance. It’s a swirl of snow globe-like emotion. It’s certainly nostalgic. Romantic even. But it’s also in the perpetual past. Which is what they say of true love, of its temporality. In that to be wrapped in love is to be captured in a duration we experience only when it finishes.

If then, these opening scenes are conjectures, emotions or sentiments of remembered time, we can read the rest of the film as a kind of lesson on trauma. Certainly, the peacock’s viscosity oozes a kind of malevolence that’s hard to get past. But there’s also a coldness to the shattering scene. That bullet time suspension. The atomistic scene that comes from the peacock’s dissolution of true love. Here the crispness of the curtains’ detail returns to the ideation of the jewels. They spin in a kind of blank slate. A cold and disembodied world. A bit like the emptiness of Nicholas Mangan’s video work A World Undone (2012). That works primordial void is similarly echoed in Hye Rim Lee’s suspension of life. The peacock’s menace obliviates the swans. Like Nicholas Mangan’s granular dissolution of 4404-million-year-old crystal, all that is left, the only remnant of life in Lee’s void are the indelible hard gems of the crowns which take so long to break down. Which is to say, all that remains of the prince isn’t his bodily form but his symbolic order. It’s a classic dichotomy. The hard edge of reality’s incessant obligation and memory’s hazy duration.

This cold hard world! And yet in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Rothbart doesn’t so much capture Odette as simply suspend her. He freezes her in an alternate eternity as a swan. She’s captured but not tamed, not wholly sublimated to Rothbart’s whim. She’s simply suspended and doomed to wait for her prince to rescue her. True love, how pathetic. Perhaps, this is a realpolitik lesson. That love for whatever reason is simply a fantasy. A hazy blur. It’s here then that we can see how those praying mantises might allude to an entirely different narrative. Afterall, with their siren-like narrative of seduction, praying mantises have long been a symbol that sublimates that masculine fantasy of control. Think too, how even in Tchaikovsky, the prince’s death triumphs over Rothbart, but it also frees Odette from both men. Does it not unbind her from the captivity of Rothbart’s malign enchantment and Siegfried the suitor? How easy it would be to set up a reading in which Odette beguiles the prince only to betray him, finding a kind of emancipation in the sisterhood of swans. That’s certainly the turn Hye Rim Lee’s film seems to take.

If the prince is suspended in the primal void, there’s no indication Odette is there. Indeed, who do we see when Hye Rim Lee pulls the curtains back but Odette again. This time hoisting Rothbart into the sky in an arc of triumph. Well, in fact, what we see first is the pointily inquisitive beak of the peacock, so insidiously different to that graceful arc of the swan’s. Rothbart’s beady eyes too!⁽³⁾ And yet there’s a real sorrow to him now. His viscosity is gone. Indeed, he’s a white peacock now! He’s been drained. This is a defanged Rothbart. His energy has been expended.

Vulnerable and exposed Rothbart is easy prey for Odette who swoops down and hoists him skyward. She has rid herself of the prince and now she expunges that controlling masculine energy once and for all. She hoists Rothbart into the sun, becoming a kind of faux martyr, worthy of a Byzantine icon. It’s symbolic overtime and yet like most of Hye Rim Lee’s work it’s deeply iconographic. Rothbart’s demise is a masculine death. An exorcism of controlling forces. How fitting then, as Odette hoists this emptied vanquished force into the sunlight, that Hye Rim Lee returns the swan corps to dance beneath this martyred cross. And fitting too that this community of cohesion is no longer bathed in that hazy romantic lens but conducted in the crisp clarity of a highly defined new dawn.