Black Swan *Spoilers*

Utterly brilliant.

While I had some major issues with the editing and a few complaints about the cinematography, Portman’s performance was one of the best I’ve seen in a whole lot of years, and the story was engrossing because you never knew exactly what was real and what wasn’t.

What I loved most about the movie was that it got made at all. In an age of Focker’s #17 or whatever it is, remakes and converting old TV shows, that a movie with such a dark theme, that never relents and takes it easy on the characters or the audience and that avoids cliche every time it looks like it’s going to go that direction, got made and got major studio distribution makes me happy in the extreme.

Spoiler Alert!!!
The story is not to expose a mental illness, it is to expose the development of a performer’s character and how it can take over the vulnerable performer. Obviously, Nina has issues… But the movie is much better if we try not to diagnose her with anything other than perfectionism. Many dancers/actors/performers understand this strive for the perfect technique and performance. This role leads her to self exploration and while she explored, she found her inner “black swan”, which has been hiding for many reasons… her mother, the obsessions with dance, and never maturing like Lily or other females her age. Just as the plot of *Swan Lake *shows, her “white swan” gives the power to her “black swan”, and her “white swan” suffers the same fate as the White Swan in Swan Lake.
I do have a few questions…

1.) Why does Nina’s mother not notice Lily in the hall way before they go out to the bar? Does she say anything to her when she answers the door?

2.) I believe it is possible that the relationship between Nina and Tomas could have been going on the entire time, including when the lights went out in the studio. Where Lily represented what she really wanted to do. Lily would do what she was reluctant to do, including touching herself. Is there anything I missed that could clear this up for me?

3.) What was the reason of Nina visiting Beth and the stabbing at the end? I feel like I don’t truly understand the symbolism of Beth’s character. Is it just the future of Nina and Nina feeling compassion for Beth?

Oddly, I agree with everything you just said, yet I still didn’t care for the movie. I think I just felt much of the “never taking it easy” was done purely for shock value. It felt like a 2 hour assault on the senses (well, at least two of them), which isn’t necessarily bad. The problem, the more I think about it, is that I was neither rooting for or against Nina. She was just a messed up girl who was utterly incapable of growing up and had a foolish outlook on the world, and I never understood how she wound up that way. I mean, her mother wasn’t June Cleaver, but she wasn’t Joan Crawford, either. I can’t connect to a character like that and, thus, can’t connect to the movie.

Natalie Portman’s acting has always struck me in much the same way her character’s dancing is described in the film: Technically perfect, but lacking any visceral reality.

I think she attains the reality in this film. And what’s more, my wife tells me she read online somewhere* that Aranofsky was pretty much a Thomas Leroy style jerk to Portman the whole time (not including the sexual element). Is that life imitating art or the other way around?

*I can’t find any references, though.

I thought the film was fine, but kind of trite. As for whether we can identify with the protagonist, I used to hang out with theater types and I think that many of them at least want to identify with a character like that. I myself can report that I gave my absolute finest performance one night as Linus in You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown as a result of some kind of turmoil or other I was suffering offstage at home and at school. I’ve never understood why stress off stage should lead to an improved performance in a light role in a light musical, but it apparently really does work that way. I wasn’t crazy, but I can understand the suffering/onstage-performance-quality connection.

But though I suspect a lot of people might want there to be a moral-to-the-story here about the relationship between suffering and art, really, this isn’t about a person who suffered for art–it’s about someone suffering from an illness who has been abused and manipulated by others for their own gain, and everyone (including she herself) justifies the abuse by pointing to the finished product. Really, really finished in this case.

(BTW: Did she really die? It doesn’t really matter. If I had to make an argument, I’d say there’s no way she could have danced so much so well if it were a fatal wound. She probably just passed out at the end. But she thought she was dying, and that’s important.

Heck, I think you can argue she didn’t even stab herself–we can plainly see the bloodstain on her costume as she dances the final act. How could the other dancers, the techies, and the audience not notice it?)

As for the question of camp, I had the distinct impression that some of the dramatic moments were intentionally played for laughs. The body dragging scene in particular. I couldn’t quite figure out why they did this, though.

I just read the wikipedia synopsis of Swan Lake. It looks like no one’s done a version where just Odette kills herself at the end–it’s usually either a happy ending or both Odette and the Prince kill themselves together. Just a note…

Tomas was saying about his version that he was trying something no one has done before.

Definitely enjoyed the movie as I was watching it. The only drawbacks were some of the goofy CGI, like when her legs bend and she starts growing feathers. Too cartoony to be horrifying.

The symbolism of Nina always wearing white, and Lily always wearing black (and even wings tattooed on her back :rolleyes:) was groan inducing.

Also, there’s no way of knowing which scenes were supposed to be real and which were fake. Did Nina really break her mom’s hand? Did she really stab herself? Who knows. With no way of knowing the story becomes uninteresting.

I saw it last night and really enjoyed it. Yes, it was an over-the-top assault on your senses, but I think it really worked. I thought the scene where she literally becomes the black swan was terrific. I discovered myself involuntarily clenching my fists and holding my breath during that last act, and it seemed like the rest of my theater’s audience was just as captivated. Natalie Portman’s performance was a tour de force. There must be only a few seconds in the entire film that she is not on screen (and that is when the camera is seeing from her POV). She played the fragile, sheltered young woman under enormous pressure so well that I was rooting for her to succeed even after she had apparently murdered Lily. I really hope she gets an Oscar for Black Swan.

Beth is Von Rothbart. She has cursed Nina/Odette and Nina’s visiting her is supposed to evoke the scene at the end of the ballet, after Odette has died, breaking the curse, when the other swans drive Von Rothbart into the lake and drown him.

Just saw it on Sew Year’s Eve! I absolutely LOVED this film and I think it’s Aronofsky’s best. I think that some of the questions are answered somewhat easily. Pardon my run on.

Nina doesn’t really know how to think and react for herself. She can only express herself through dance. She is beautiful, graceful and pathetic. Zero personality. So for some of the unresolved questions, I think they’re easily answered:

Thomas tells her before the show that she must forget the little girl she really is because “she’s her only enemy.” He tells her to get rid of that. When she “kills” Lily in the dressing room, this is the epitome of her assumed relationship with Lily, Thomas, and her mother. She really stabs herself finally understanding that SHE really is her own enemy. The Lily she hates and is blaming for her self consciousness is simply herself.

If you remember, after she stabs Lily and campily drags Lily’s dying body in the back of the dressing room, she actually, for the first real time, holds it together all by herself. She acknowledges what she did, but drags Lily in the back and goes back onstage to perform. Fantastically, in fact.

For cinematic leeway, we’ll ignore the gaping wound in a white dress that should’ve been noticed by anyone in the audience or onstage. Hey, these wannabe prima donnas all the way from Beth to Thomas To Mother to Nina can’t be noticed: they’re too into themselves.

As far as all the campy feelings some of you got from the special effects, dragging Lily’s body, especially her growing the black feathers-- this is her hallucinating. Like I mentioned, Nina is painfully unaware. She can’t have a boyfriend, stand up to anyone, and her hallucinations and dreams are all that’s real. Whenever something looked “campy” or ridiculous, I thought it was obvious that Nina was going Woodstock again. :smiley: Especially when the paintings started to talk.

I liked the comments referencing the characters too. I also agree that Beth was the real life Von Rothbart to Nina. Beth was not stabbing her cheeks with a nail file, but Nina was imagining this only to provoke her fantasy.

And here’s another point: Although Nina never points fingers and blames anyone directly, she is told to “live” this role. So maybe she needs a real Von Rothbart, a real Black Swan and a real reluctant, yet flock of followers reluctantly naming her Queen. Beth and Lil are like Von Rothbart, Thomas and Mommy representing a prince or a decent and different path and Nina as her own Odette, silently accusing her peeps of cursing her into her own swan and death being her true path of freedom. Thomas describes this about Odette in “Swan Lake” at the cast meeting in the beginning.

And yes, the Mila/Natalie scene was OOOOOO! LOVED it, of course. But what MY question is about that is why doesn’t Nina just listen to a cute, fellow contemporary in ballet and just “relax” and “let loose”? When Nina gets honest advice, she runs and runs and runs.

I’ll also add that Nina’s hallucinations seem to run here, there and everywhere. Arts competitors can really be brutal, but I think that whenever we heard background comments like, “bitch”, “awful” and when “WHORE” was written in the mirror, it didn’t really happen. That’s just Nina and her unfed brain.

Shit, dancers, just get fat. If you ate pizza instead of air for lunch, Nina might actually smile. :smiley:

I saw the movie yesterday and really loved it. It was satisfyingly creepy and captivating and Natalie Portman gave a really amazing performance. I didn’t really have any questions plotwise although I don’t really get why they had to add the completely gratuitious lesbian sex scene. Did the filmmakers think that since it was a movie about ballet they had to add that to get a male audience? Other than that scene, I thought it was great.

I can’t speak as to why, of course, but it did prompt one of the funniest post-movie wrap-up comments I’ve heard in a while. I heard a young man and woman talking about the movie as they left, and the girl remarked that she thought the scene might have been considered disturbing by some. Her companion responded, “Well, speaking as a dude, that fulfilled all my moviegoing needs.” :smiley:

I pretty much agree. I wanted to like this movie, and I was fully prepared to love it. I didn’t realize who directed it or know much about it before I watched it–and when I saw who it was, my first reaction was “Oh, okay, that explains it.” On the plus side, it’s more coherent than The Fountain and slightly more subtle than Requiem for a Dream. Though I don’t think Aronofsky would know a subtle metaphor if it ran into the room, jumped on the piano, and started playing subtle metaphors are here again (to steal from Blackadder). Theoretically, this is the sort of movie that I’d have a great time discussing and dissecting, but ultimately, there’s no there there.

Pretty to look at (as all his movies are) and engaging while watching, but I doubt I’ll bother to see it again.

That was my problem with the movie. I just couldn’t feel any real sympathy for the characters. Nina came across to me as so whiny and insecure that you couldn’t see how she got the ballerina job in the first place. And there’s no real backstory given for how she got that way … just vague hints. In the end, you’re left to try to work out what was real and what was hallucination but I just didn’t care enough about any of the characters to really care about what happened to them.

Beth DID stab herself in the cheeks, at least the first couple times. And when Nina tried to wrestle the nail file away from her is when the fantasy took over. The continued stabbing was all in her mind.

Nina did manage to get the nail file away from Beth, she dropped it, covered in blood, when she got back in the elevator.

I’ve seen BS two or three times, and the explicit eroticism made it difficult to concentrate on the film. I assure I didn’t have a raging semi through any of Cassavetes’s films with female protagonists, but I did with BS, and it was distracting.

That seems implausible. Beth stabbed herself? Then what with all the screaming, people would have come running, Nina would have been involved in all the ensuing hubbub, (esp. if she was for some reason holding the bloody file in her hand!) and she couldn’t have even gotten to the elevator.

As far as I could tell, the whole scene was hallucinated. I wasn’t even sure she was ever at the hospital.

As far as I could tell, the whole movie was hallucinated. I wasn’t even sure she was ever on planet earth.

No, I’m pretty sure that everything involving that stabbing was only in her mind. She might have really gone to visit Beth, but she wasn’t stabbed.

I interpreted that scene as NINA doing the stabbing. Beth “took” the file and stabbed herself in the cheek, but when Nina fled the file was still in her hands, and she dropped it. Her hands were bloody when she got home, and she had to wash them. furthering my interpretation.