As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side - a recklessness that threatens to destroy her. Thomas Leroy, the artistic director of a New York City ballet company, is mounting Swan Lake as the company's next production. Many of the ballerinas in the company aspire for the lead, which would have previously gone to the company's former principle dancer Beth Macintyre before her forced retirement.
No one wants the the role more than Nina Sayers, who lives to dance, so much so that she wants to be exactly like Beth in every aspect. Nina lives with her overbearing mother, Erica Sayers, a former ballerina who now lives vicariously through her daughter as she never made it as a ballerina herself.
Nina is a technically proficient and hard working dancer who can easily capture the essence of the innocent white swan, but Thomas doesn't believe she has the dark passion required to portray the black swan. An unexpected move by Nina convinces Thomas that Nina may have what it takes, and he gives her the lead.
Thomas will do anything to get that passion out of her. Nina feels that her new place in the company is threatened by Lily, a ballerina newly arrived into the company from San Francisco. Lily, who is looser in every aspect of her life than Nina, encompasses the essence of the black swan more so than Nina. But as Nina believes Lily is to her what she herself was to Beth, Nina, in doing whatever it takes to be perfect as both the white swan and the black swan, descends into madness.
Nina Sayers is a dancers with a New York City ballet company. She is dedicated to her art and her craft but lacks confidence. She is also pressed on by her domineering mother, also a ballerina in her youth, who gave up dancing when she got pregnant with Nina.
Kristina Anapau Galina as Galina …. Janet Montgomery Madeline as Madeline …. Sebastian Stan Andrew as Andrew …. Toby Hemingway Tom as Tom …. Sergio Torrado Sergio as Sergio …. Mark Margolis Mr.
Fithian as Mr. Fithian …. Tina Sloan Mrs. Fithian as Mrs. Abraham Aronofsky Mr. Stein as Mr. Stein as Abe Aronofsky …. Charlotte Aronofsky Mrs. Stein as Mrs. Stein …. Darren Aronofsky. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Nina Portman is a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance.
She lives with her obsessive former ballerina mother Erica Hershey who exerts a suffocating control over her. But Nina has competition: a new dancer, Lily Kunis , who impresses Leroy as well. Swan Lake requires a dancer who can play both the White Swan with innocence and grace, and the Black Swan, who represents guile and sensuality. As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side - a recklessness that threatens to destroy her.
I just want to be perfect. Rated R for strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use. Did you know Edit. Trivia Darren Aronofsky told journalist Kim Masters in a radio interview KCRW's "The Business" broadcast February 14, that Natalie Portman not only trained for a year as a dancer to prepare for the role, but paid for the the training out of her own pocket until the film found investors. Aronofsky attributed the film's getting made at all to Portman's dedication and enthusiasm.
Goofs When Nina returns home and looks for her mother, after being assigned a role, a camera operator is visible in a mirror. Quotes Thomas Leroy : The only person standing in your way is you. She soon awakens and explains to her mom and to us that it's from the prologue of Swan Lake , when the sorcerer Rothbart casts his spell on Princess Odette.
The dream has a few purposes. First, it introduces and promises a surreal tone to the film. Second, it aligns the story of the movie with the story of Swan Lake , meaning we should look at the movie as a retelling of the ballet. Third, it's a sign Nina herself has fallen under some kind of trance. In the very next scene Nina's on the subway. A few defining things happen here. First, it's the introduction of the visual duality.
We see Nina reflected in a window on the subway, her mirrored face purposefully obscure as this other persona hasn't fully emerged yet. The reflection is a huge motif that escalates all the way to the climax when Nina "fights" in her dressing room, breaking the mirror, then fatally stabbing herself with the shard of glass. The mortal wound being from a broken piece of glass from a mirror makes sense, right? Black Swan is all about duality. The mirror is representative of duality.
Aronofsky highlights that throughout by having moments where the Nina in the Mirror acts separately from the Regular Nina. At first it's harmless, but the Nina in the Mirror grows more aggressive and scary until we get the dressing room fight that occurs right before her transformation into the black swan. She straight up says, after the stabbing, "It's my turn. Visually, we really pushed that idea of what it means to look in a mirror. The Black Swan Nina who emerges from the mirror is built up to through the movie not just by the escalation of the Nina in the Mirror, but also by the subplot of Nina going through the stages of growing up.
She starts the movie in a very childlike way—waking up from a bad dream and going to tell her mom about it. You look at her bedroom and it looks like a little girl's room, not that of a year old women. We know this stunted development is partly due to Aronofsky's critique of ballet as a whole. But it's also there because the story is about Nina's loss of innocence and her struggle to tap into that darker side of herself.
By defining her as childlike, it highlights her innocence and why she struggles with the role. We see her progress, though. For much of the movie, there's a sense of building rebellion when it comes to Nina and her mother. Which is very typical of teenagers and young adults. Then the whole sexual awakening sub-sub plot. God, that first scene where Nina touches herself and starts to get into it until she looks over and sees her mom asleep in the chair beside the bed.
It's one of the most awkward and realistically terrifying things I've ever seen in a movie. That's exactly the point too: this is why Nina's stunted as she is, because her mom's presence is so overwhelming it limits Nina's privacy and choices and thus her experiences. The night out with Lily begins how? It could have simply been: Lily shows up and asks Nina to go out, Nina hesitates, but Lily convinces her.
Instead, it's: Nina hesitates, and Nina's mom keeps showing up and demanding Nina come back inside. To the point where Lily is like, "Jesus Christ. Of course, then, it's that night she comes home, locks her mom out, and masturbates fully after being denied and frustrated for so long. This is a breakthrough. One line that's always cracked me up is how not long after Nina "becomes a woman", she has a moment where she yells at her mom, "I'm moving out.
But it's the cherry on top of the "Nina goes from a child to a woman" subplot. Aronofsky really wanted to make sure that was clear and the dialogue communicated it. As Black Swan is so heavily reliant on duality, it makes sense there's a duality to the hallucinations. On the one hand, there are signs aplenty that Nina is mentally ill.
On the other hand, there's her desire for perfection and what that means when it comes to being the white swan and black swan. Let's first look at the mental illness, then we'll look at her obsession with perfection. The signs of extreme mental illness, like with everything else in this movie, build up over time. We know Nina's mother is overbearing and representative of an over-involved, over-protective type of never-had-success dancers who obsess over their daughter's careers.
But that's not the sole reason the mother babies Nina. It's hinted at, then told to us, that Nina has had psychological issues in the past.
These mostly had to do with scratching and other means of self-mutilation. There's a sad tension. The mom's trying to do her best to help her sick daughter not go over a psychological waterfall for a second time. But the mom is also so jealous and bitter that she's one of several primary reasons why Nina is about to breakdown again. I mean, there's a whole room in their apartment dedicated to grotesque paintings of Nina.
This isn't a healthy environment, and it's hard to determine what came first: the mental illness or the mother's obsession. If Black Swan was only about a mentally ill girl finally tipping into insanity This is why we have the secondary aspect of Nina's hallucinations. And a far more sinister interpretation of the hallucinations.
When Nina confronts the director, Thomas Vincent Cassel , about whether she'll get the part, this is the conversation:. Yes you're beautiful, fearful, fragile—ideal casting. But the Black Swan? Thomas: Really?! In four years, every time you dance, I see you obsess getting each and every move right, but I never see you lose yourself. All that discipline, for what? Thomas: Perfection is not just about control. It's also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience.
And very few have it in them. Thomas kisses her. During the kiss there's a strange feminine soundscape that ends with what sounds like playful laughter. Nina then bites Thomas's lip. Ending the kiss. This scene occurs 20 minutes into Black Swan. A general rule for movie structure is that there are a few places for important information: the opening scene, the final scene, the climax, and 20 minutes in.
Look at many of the movies you love and about the minute mark is when the main story conflict announces itself. The minute mark of The Lion King is when the hyenas attack Simba for the first time, a stark contrast to the lightheartedness that had defined Simba's story up to that point.
Check out our deep-dive analysis of Fight Club if you really want to get weird. What's the last thing we hear Nina say? She's finished her masterpiece performance, the crowd's giving her a standing ovation, everyone in the company has surrounded and congratulated her, Thomas has praised her, but then there's horror as they see Nina's nearly eviscerated herself. What did you do? And Thomas gives a look of shock and what could be read as understanding.
Nina continues, clearly pleased despite dying , "It was perfect. That conversation shows Nina was very aware of what happened to her. She's not some confused girl having a moment of stunned clarity.
She's a professional dancer who wanted to give a perfect performance, and she did what she had to do to give that performance. She straight up told us at the beginning, "I wanna be perfect.
But this plays back into what happens in the real world: ballerinas are held to insane standards, and the stress they face to maintain those standards is physically and psychologically destructive, at best.
But it can be outright annihilating. I started doing some googling about the rates of suicides in ballet dancers, and even though there was not a lot of hard hitting solid statistical data, the number of articles was very upsetting.
The most noted dancer who committed suicide was a year-old lead dancer with the New York City Ballet, Joseph Duell in after performing in Symphony in C, and rehearsing Who Cares? So while we can pretty safely assume Nina's dealing with some mental illness caused by her career and mother, she's also, in a way, aware of what's happening because she wants it to happen.
If she wants to be perfect, to be both the White Swan and Black Swan, then this is what has to happen. Swan Lake is, after all, a tragedy. The distinction between the White Swan and the Black Swan is, I think, the final piece to the puzzle. In the climax, when Nina finally gets to dance, we see her oscillate between two emotional states. The first is someone completely frayed and overwhelmed and either on the brink of tears or crying. The second is angry, violent, territorial, confident, sexy, dangerous.
At one point, these two sides of Nina actually fight one another. Some read this back and forth as indicative of Nina's mental health woes.
And yeah, definitely. But we know that Nina wanted the performance to be perfect. And we're straight up told by Thomas what defines each of the swans. The Black Swan is about seduction, imprecision, effortlessness, lack of control, letting go, an evil twin, someone with bite. As we see Nina in those backstage moments, it's easy to read her mood swings as a complete psychological break. But it could also be representative of an artist inhabiting their character in order to perform to the best of their ability and even approach perfection.
To dance the part of the Black Swan, Nina allowed herself to fall under a spell. She drove herself to that darkness. By letting go, she surprised herself, surprised everyone else, and found transcendence. To reach that state, she stopped rejecting the pressure and duress of her career and mother. Instead, she let it devour her. She gave into her urges and rage. She allowed the repressed part of her to emerge. At first in the mirror, but then in reality. That dichotomy explains the hallucinations we see.
On the whole, the hallucinations serve to coax out of Nina either the fear and fragility of the White Swan or the darkness and negative energy of the Black Swan.
A lot of the time it's a mixture of the two. The hallucinations ramp up for a reason: Nina's getting into character, and the closer we are to the performance the more in character she has to be. The night of show, of course, she's at her most psychologically broken.
Superficially, it's because she's overwhelmed by everything that's happened: the pressure of the role, the pressure from her mom, the years of psychological deterioration, the mix of paranoia and sexual confusion regarding Lily. It's a lot. But what's scary is that this is also what she wants, it's a choice. Nina's such a perfectionist that in order to perform as the Swan Queen, as the best version of the Swan Queen, she needs to embody the character completely. So it's kind of like she lets herself be consumed by all of these emotions in order to bolster the performance.
Real fast, I do love that Nina's dropped during her White Swan performance.
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