Plot
A
New York City ballet company is preparing for the production of
Swan Lake, choosing to cast a new lead to replace current star Beth MacIntyre (
Winona Ryder) as the Swan Queen. However, the lead must maintain an adequate portrayal of both the White and Black Swans. Nina Sayers (
Natalie Portman), a dancer, is picked to compete for the part alongside several other young dancers, including newcomer Lily (
Mila Kunis). Nina lives with her caring but overbearing mother Erica (
Barbara Hershey), a failed dancer turned amateur artist who tries to control much of Nina's life.
The ballet director, Thomas Leroy (
Vincent Cassel), is reluctant to cast Nina; he claims that she is the perfect White Swan, with perfect technique, but that she lacks the passion of the darkly sensual Black Swan. During a confrontation over the role, Thomas kisses her, and she bites his lip, surprising and exhilarating him; directly after, he casts her in the lead. He presents his new star in front of a crowd, including the now unstable Beth. After a heated exchange with Beth, Thomas and Nina leave the party. The next day, the dancers hear the news of an accident in which Beth was hit by a car. Thomas confesses to Nina that he believes she threw herself in front of traffic because of her self-destructive and unpredictable behavior.
Nina displays a number of
psychotic symptoms, including strong delusions and elaborate visual
hallucinations. She begins to feel paranoid that Lily, her understudy, is determined to take the lead away from her. Thomas, meanwhile, becomes increasingly critical of Nina's "frigid" dancing as the Black Swan, and tells her that she should stop being so perfect and simply lose herself in the Black Swan role.
On another occasion, Thomas, Nina and some other dancers practice in the studio together, but due to Nina's lack of passion in her black swan role, Thomas dismisses the dancers and keeps Nina there. He dances with her, reminding her to let go of the frigidness and display her sensuality. Thomas grabs her and kisses her passionately, showing her the emotions that he wants her to display in her dancing. He abruptly leaves the studio with the lesson that he seduced her, and it needs to be the other way around.
One night, Lily appears at Nina's door and pressures Nina to go out on the town for a bit. Nina is first reluctant, but after her mother's pushiness to get rid of Lily, she quickly leaves to escape her controlling mother. At dinner, Lily offers her
Ecstasy, which Nina declines, but later Lily slips it into her drink when she goes to the restroom. After their night out, they return to Nina's apartment where they have sex. Nina wakes up alone and late the next morning, and rushes to rehearsal. When she enters the studio, she finds Lily dancing as the Swan Queen in her absence. Furious, Nina confronts Lily, and asks why she didn't wake her up in the morning. Lily states she spent the night with a man whom she met at the club, and teases Nina for fantasizing about her.
Nina travels to the hospital to visit Beth, who is sitting silently in her room. Nina takes out a black bag and begins to place objects on the table, including makeup and a nail file, which she had taken from Beth's changing room after her departure. Beth has an outraged episode, grabbing the file and stabbing herself through the cheeks, seeking both to punish herself for her perceived worthlessness and to further torment Nina. Nina rushes out of the room and enters the elevator, but realizes that she is now holding the bloody file. Panicking, she drops the file.
The night before opening, Nina is rehearsing late and continues to experience strong visual hallucinations. When she returns home, she sees her mother's paintings speaking and mocking her. She also notices that the rash on her shoulder has worsened, with little black barbs poking through her skin. Nina pulls one of the barbs from her skin, and it appears to be a black feather. Nina's eyes appear to turn into reddish swan eyes and her legs violently contort into the shape of a swan's. As she tries to steady herself, she falls and knocks herself out on her bedpost.
Nina awakes the night of the opening performance locked in her bedroom with her mother. Nina's mother tells her that she called the company and informed them that Nina wasn't feeling well and won't be able to perform. After violently forcing her mother to let her leave, Nina arrives at the theater and immediately prepares herself as the White Swan.
The first act is an abomination; the Prince drops Nina while dancing onstage. Distraught, Nina returns to her dressing room and finds Lily there, dressed in the Black Swan costume. Nina shoves Lily into a full-length mirror, and during the ensuing scuffle, takes a shard of the mirror and stabs Lily, killing her. After hiding Lily's body, Nina returns to the stage and dances the Black Swan passionately and sensually, growing black feathers all over her body as she dances, her arms becoming black wings as she finally loses herself and transforms into a black swan; at the end of the act, she receives a standing ovation. A shot from the audience's perspective reveals that Nina is in fact unchanged, and that the feathers and wings are another of Nina's hallucinations, however her shadows on the backdrop show the outline of the wings she had imagined. When she leaves the stage, she finds Thomas and kisses him once again.
Back in her dressing room, she is interrupted by a knock at her door: it's Lily, who has come to congratulate her. Nina realizes the fight was another hallucination, but the mirror was shattered — she notices a wound on her body and realizes that she apparently stabbed herself as the White Swan, not Lily. Back on stage, Nina dances passionately and seamlessly in the final act as the White Swan. In the final moments of the ballet, when the Swan "dies" by jumping off a cliff on the stage (landing on a hidden mattress), the audience erupts in thunderous applause while the cast discovers Nina lying on the mattress. After Thomas enthusiastically congratulates her on her performance, he and the cast see she is apparently covered in blood. Though Nina lies wounded and likely dying, she feels happy that everything she went through helped her to perfect her performance. The film draws to a close with Nina reveling in the audience's applause as she whispers "I was perfect".
Mila Kunis was first approached to perform in
Black Swan in 2008. She and co-star Natalie Portman spent six months training and toning their bodies before filming began.
Aronofsky first discussed with Portman the possibility of a ballet film in 2000, and he found she was interested in playing a ballet dancer.
[3] Portman explained being part of
Black Swan, "I'm trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film, especially being such a small person."
[4] Portman also introduced Aronofsky to Kunis, whom he knew from the 2008 film
Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
[3] Kunis contrasted Lily with Nina, "My character is very loose... She's not as technically good as Natalie's character, but she has more passion, naturally. That's what [Nina] lacks."
[5] The female characters are directed in the
Swan Lakeproduction by Thomas Leroy, played by Cassel. He compared his character to
George Balanchine, who co-founded
New York City Ballet and was "a control freak, a true artist using sexuality to direct his dancers".
[6]Portman and Kunis started training six months before the start of filming in order to attain a body type and muscular tone more similar to those of professional dancers.
[7] Portman worked out for five hours a day, doing ballet, cross-training, and swimming. A few months closer to filming, she began choreography training.
[8] Kunis engaged in
cardio and
Pilates. Kunis said, "I did ballet as a kid like every other kid does ballet. You wear a tutu and you stand on stage and you look cute and twirl. But this is very different because you can't fake it. You can't just stay in there and like pretend you know what you're doing. Your whole body has to be structured differently."
[9] Georgina Parkinson, a
ballet mistress from the
American Ballet Theatre, coached the actors in ballet.
[10] For certain scenes,
American Ballet Theatre soloists Sarah Laneand
Maria Riccetto were "dance doubles" for Portman and Kunis respectively.
[11] Aronofsky said during filming about Portman's ballet performance, "She was able to pull it off. Except for the wide shots when she has to be
en pointe for a real long time, it's Natalie on screen. I haven't used her double a lot."
[7] Kunis, for the film "trained seven days a week, five hours, for five, six months total, and ... was put on a very strict diet of 1,200 calories a day." She lost 20 pounds from her normal weight of about 117 pounds, and reported that Portman "became smaller than I did."
[12][edit]Production
[edit]Conception
Scene from the ballet
Swan Lake in which the Black Swan (Odile) tricks and seduces the Prince
Darren Aronofsky first became interested in ballet when his sister studied dance at the
High School of Performing Arts in New York City. The basic idea for the film started when he hired screenwriters to rework a screenplay called
The Understudy, which was about off-Broadway actors and explored the notion of being haunted by a double. Aronofsky said the screenplay had elements of the film
All About Eve,
Roman Polanski's film
The Tenant, and
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella
The Double. The director had also seen numerous productions of
Swan Lake, and he connected the duality of the White Swan and the Black Swan to his script.
[7] When researching for production of
Black Swan, he found ballet to be "a very insular world" whose dancers were "not impressed by movies". Regardless, the director found active and inactive dancers to share their experiences with him. He also stood backstage to see the
Bolshoi Ballet perform at the
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
[3]Aronofsky called
Black Swan a companion piece to his previous film
The Wrestler, recalling one of his early projects about a love affair between a wrestler and a ballerina. He eventually separated the wrestling and the ballet worlds as "too much for one movie". He compared the two films: "Wrestling some consider the lowest art—if they would even call it art—and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves."
[3] About the psychological thriller nature of
Black Swan, actress Natalie Portman compared the film's tone to Polanski's 1968 film
Rosemary's Baby,
[18] while Aronofsky said Polanski's
Repulsion (1965) and
The Tenant(1976) were "big influences" on the final film.
[3] Actor Vincent Cassel also compared
Black Swan to Polanski's early works and additionally compared it to
David Cronenberg's early works.
[19][edit]Development and filming
Aronofsky and Portman first discussed the ballet film in 2000, though the script was yet to be written.
[3] He told her about the love scene between competing ballet dancers, and Portman recalled, "I thought that was very interesting because this movie is in so many ways an exploration of an artist's ego and that narcissistic sort of attraction to yourself and also repulsion with yourself."
[20] On the decade's wait before production, she said, "The fact that I had spent so much time with the idea ... allowed it to marinate a little before we shot."
[21] When Aronofsky proposed a detailed outline of
Black Swan to
Universal Pictures, the studio decided to fast-track development of the project in January 2007.
[22] The project did not come together at the studio, and Aronofsky would go on to shoot
The Wrestler instead. After finishing
The Wrestler in 2008, he asked Mark Heyman, who had worked for him on the film, to write
Black Swan.
[3] By June 2009, Universal had placed the project in
turnaround, generating attention from other studios and specialty divisions, particularly with actress Portman attached to star.
[23] Black Swan began development under Protozoa Pictures and Overnight Productions, the latter financing the film. In July 2009, Kunis was cast.
[24][edit]Soundtrack
Black Swan: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack marks the fifth consecutive collaboration between Aronofsky and English composer
Clint Mansell. Mansell attempted to score the film based on
Tchaikovsky's ballet,
[28] but with radical changes to the music.
[29] Because of the use of Tchaikovsky's music, the score was deemed ineligible to be entered into the
2010 Academy Awards for
Best Original Score.
[30] The film also featured various new pieces of music by English production duo
The Chemical Brothers, although they're not featured on the official soundtrack.
[31]
|
| 1. | "Nina's Dream" | 2:48 |
| 2. | "Mother Me" | 1:06 |
| 3. | "The New Season" | 2:39 |
| 4. | "A Room of Her Own" | 1:56 |
| 5. | "A New Swan Queen" | 3:28 |
| 6. | "Lose Yourself" | 2:08 |
| 7. | "Cruel Mistress" | 3:29 |
| 8. | "Power, Seduction, Cries" | 1:42 |
| 9. | "The Double" | 2:20 |
| 10. | "Opposites Attract" | 3:45 |
| 11. | "Night of Terror" | 8:01 |
| 12. | "Stumbled Beginnings..." | 3:51 |
| 13. | "It's My Time" | 1:30 |
| 14. | "A Swan Is Born" | 1:38 |
| 15. | "Perfection" | 5:45 |
| 16. | "A Swan Song (For Nina)" | 6:23 |
Total length: | 52:38 |
[edit]Release
Black Swan had its world premiere as the opening film at the
67th Venice Film Festival on September 1, 2010. It received a standing ovation whose length
Variety said made it "one of the strongest Venice openers in recent memory".
[32] The festival's artistic director Marco Mueller had chosen
Black Swan over
The American (starring
George Clooney) for opening film, saying, "[It] was just a better fit... Clooney is a wonderful actor, and he will always be welcome in Venice. But it was as simple as that."
[33] Black Swanscreened in competition and is the third consecutive film directed by Aronofsky to premiere at the festival, following
The Fountain and
The Wrestler.
[34] In addition,
Black Swan was one of seven films nominated for the
Queer Lion prize, to be awarded to the best film with "homosexual themes or queer interests",
[35]though
En el futuro (
In The Future) by Argentinian director Mauro Andrizzi won the prize.
[36] The release of
Black Swan in the United Kingdom was brought forward from 11 February to 21 January 2011. According to
The Independent, the film is one of "the most highly anticipated" of late 2010. The newspaper compared it to the 1948 ballet film
The Red Shoes in having "a nightmarish quality ... of a dancer consumed by her desire to dance".
[44][edit]Reception
[edit]Box office
The film had a
limited release in select cities in
North America on December 3, 2010 in 18 theaters. The film took in a total of $415,822 on its opening day, averaging $23,101 per theater.
[45] By the end of its opening weekend it grossed $1,443,809—$80,212 per theater. The per location average was the second highest for the opening weekend of 2010 behind
The King's Speech.
[46] The film has
Fox Searchlight Pictures highest per-theater average gross ever, and it ranks 21st on the all-time list.
[47] On its second weekend the film expanded to 90 theaters, and grossed $3.3 million, ranking it as the sixth film at the box-office.
[48] In its third weekend, it expanded again to 959 theaters and grossed $8,383,479. By its sixth weekend of release, it had expanded into 1,584 theaters and raised its over-all domestic total to $61,218,504.
[49][edit]Critical reception
Black Swan cast and crew (from left to right: producer Scott Franklin, actress Mila Kunis, actor Vincent Cassel, director Darren Aronofsky) discuss the film with a moderator at the BFI London Film Festival, where the movie was nominated for Best Film
Black Swan has received widely favorable reviews from film critics.
[50] Review aggregate
Rotten Tomatoes reports that 88% of 215 critics have given the film a positive review, holding an average score of 8.2/10 with particular praise for Portman's performance.
[50] According to the website, the film's critical consensus is, "Bracingly intense, passionate, and wildly melodramatic, Black Swan glides on Darren Aronofsky's bold direction – and a bravura performance from Natalie Portman."
[50]Review aggregate
Metacritic has given the film a weighted score of 79, based on 41 reviews, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".
[51] In September 2010,
Entertainment Weekly reported that based on reviews from the film's screening at the Venice Film Festival, "[
Black Swan] is already set to be one of the year’s most love-it-or-hate-it movies."
[52] Reuters described the early response to the film as "largely positive" with Portman's performance being highly praised.
[53] The Sydney Morning Herald reported, "The film divided critics. Some found its theatricality maddening, but most declared themselves 'swept away'."
[54]Kurt Loder of
Reason Magazine called the film "wonderfully creepy," and wrote that "it’s not entirely satisfying; but it’s infused with the director’s usual creative brio, and it has a great dark gleaming look."
[55] Mike Goodridge from
Screen Daily called
Black Swan "alternately disturbing and exhilarating" and described the film as a hybrid of
The Turning Point and Polanski's films
Repulsion and
Rosemary's Baby. Goodridge described Portman's performance, "[She] is captivating as Nina ... she captures the confusion of a repressed young woman thrown into a world of danger and temptation with frightening veracity." The critic also commended Cassel, Kunis, and Hershey in their supporting roles, particularly comparing Hershey to
Ruth Gordon in the role of "the desperate, jealous mother". Goodridge praised Libatique's cinematography with the dance scenes and the psychologically "unnerving" scenes: "It's a mesmerising psychological ride that builds to a gloriously theatrical tragic finale as Nina attempts to deliver the perfect performance."
[56] Kirk Honeycutt of
The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a mixed review. He wrote, "[
Black Swan] is an instant guilty pleasure, a gorgeously shot, visually complex film whose badness is what's so good about it. You might howl at the sheer audacity of mixing mental illness with the body-fatiguing, mind-numbing rigors of ballet, but its lurid imagery and a hellcat competition between two rival dancers is pretty irresistible." Honeycutt commended Millepied's "sumptuous" choreography and Libatique's "darting, weaving" camera work. The critic said of the thematic mashup, "Aronofsky ... never succeeds in wedding genre elements to the world of ballet ... White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness."
[57]The Canadian Press reported that some Canadian ballet dancers felt that the film depicted dancers negatively and exaggerated elements of their lives but gave Portman high marks for her dance technique
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