The danger of seeking total perfection

Rating: 7/10 (19 February 2013)

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a young dancer at a New York City ballet company, and she also lives with her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), a former dancer herself. As the film begins, Nina dreamt that she is the Black Swan in Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake'. It would be the same ballet that Nina had dreamt about which would come to form the new season at the ballet company she is part of.
The ballet company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) wants a new approach to 'Swan Lake', wanting someone to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan for the production. But he wants a new face for the new season, which meant that Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) was forced to retire. Beth's anger at the news would lead to near-fatal consequences: Getting drunk at a banquet and hitting out at Thomas and Nina, before being seriously injured in a car accident which Thomas suspected was done deliberately.
Before what Beth did which landed her in hospital, Nina auditioned to be both the White and Black Swan. While she performed well as the White Swan, she could not quite do it as the Black Swan which led her to persuade Thomas to reconsider. Thomas would forcibly kiss her before Nina bites him back in a sudden change of character. Nina would eventually get what she wanted, becoming the Swan Queen.
But after being awarded the lead role as the Swan Queen, Nina started to witness strange happenings at the ballet company, and this is not including the tense working relationship she shares with the new addition at the company in Lily (Mila Kunis), and at home battling against her mother on the insistence of taking part in the production. As the film progresses, Nina began to understand how Beth must have felt to be forced to retire.
There are times watching the film, one cannot but wonder at times what Natalie Portman's character was going through after being awarded the lead role was real or just of her own hallucinations, as it look very real each time. The production of 'Swan Lake' in the film may have being served as a backdrop, but it does make one stop and wonder whether questing for total perfection in anything is the appropriate thing to do.
Regardless of how one views the ballet scenes in terms of how the likes of Portman or Mila Kunis's respective character dance to the music, ballet is never easy to begin with. But it is for certain that searching for total perfection can has its consequences.