Black Swan
“Perfection has a price, and Nina is about to discover how high it can be.”
Director
Darren Aronofsky
Release
21 January 2011
Runtime
108 Minutes
Certificate
15
Synopsis
Nina Sayers lives almost entirely for ballet. Disciplined, controlled, and technically precise, she shares a claustrophobic home life with her protective mother, Erica, a former dancer whose ambitions now seem focused on her daughter. When prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre is pushed aside, company director Thomas Leroy begins searching for a new dancer to lead his production of Swan Lake. Nina possesses everything he wants from the White Swan: innocence, vulnerability and technical perfection. The Black Swan is another matter. Thomas believes Nina's need for control prevents her from embracing the sensuality and spontaneity the second half of the role demands. Then Lily arrives. Confident and uninhibited in ways Nina isn't, Lily appears to possess precisely the qualities Nina struggles to find within herself. Nina becomes increasingly fascinated by her — and increasingly convinced that Lily threatens everything she has worked to achieve. As opening night approaches, the boundaries between rivalry, paranoia and reality begin to collapse. Nina may finally be becoming the Black Swan. The question is what will be left of her when she does.
The Movie Trailer
Black Swan is Darren Aronofsky's intense psychological thriller about ambition, obsession and the destructive pursuit of perfection.
Natalie Portman stars as Nina Sayers, a technically gifted ballerina in a prestigious New York company who has devoted almost every part of her life to dance. When artistic director Thomas Leroy chooses her to lead a new production of Swan Lake, Nina appears to have finally earned the opportunity she's spent years pursuing.
But the role demands that she embody two very different characters: the innocent White Swan and her seductive, dangerous opposite, the Black Swan.
Nina seems perfectly suited to one.
Becoming the other begins to consume her.
THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION
Nina Sayers Gets Everything She Ever Wanted
For Nina, being cast as the Swan Queen should represent the culmination of years of sacrifice.
Instead, it becomes the beginning of her collapse.
She has built herself around discipline and control, qualities that make her an exceptional White Swan but prevent her from accessing the darker personality Thomas demands from the Black Swan.
The harder Nina pushes herself towards perfection, the less control she appears to have over everything outside the performance.
Black Swan turns that contradiction into the engine of its psychological horror: achieving Nina's dream may require destroying the person who spent her life pursuing it.
WHITE SWAN, BLACK SWAN
Natalie Portman at the Centre of Black Swan
Natalie Portman's performance keeps the film locked closely to Nina's increasingly unstable perspective.
At first she appears fragile, meticulous and almost painfully restrained. As the pressure surrounding Swan Lake intensifies, that control begins to fracture.
Mila Kunis provides an effective contrast as Lily, whose relaxed confidence represents everything Nina believes she lacks, while Vincent Cassel's Thomas continually pushes Nina beyond the boundaries she has constructed around herself.
Barbara Hershey adds another layer of pressure as Erica, whose relationship with her daughter makes Nina's home feel almost as restrictive as the rehearsal room.
Portman's performance ultimately makes it increasingly difficult to separate Nina's on-stage transformation from the one occurring inside her mind.
LOSING CONTROL
When Performance and Reality Become Impossible to Separate
Black Swan gradually removes the certainty beneath Nina's world.
Reflections behave strangely. Injuries appear and disappear. Encounters become difficult to trust. Nina sees things that may be real, imagined or somewhere between the two.
Aronofsky uses that uncertainty to place the audience inside Nina's perspective rather than simply observing her from outside it.
By the time opening night arrives, ballet has stopped being merely a performance.
Nina's desire to become the Black Swan has consumed her identity to such an extent that transformation, performance and self-destruction have become almost impossible to distinguish from one another.