Story of a paranoid schizophrenic perfectionist who gives it her all.

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 2011)

This movie is somewhat controversial in that for every viewer who sees it as a superb movie, you can probably find another who says they only wanted to walk out half-way through. I am in the camp that it is a very good movie. Not a joyous one, but a good study of a dancer who suffers from paranoia, schizophrenia, and is an obsessive perfectionist.
Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, and she channels her sickness into her ballet dancing. It helps that she has a mother, Barbara Hershey as Erica Sayers, a former dancer herself who still treats her daughter with the control that you might for a 10-year-old.
Nina is in the ballet company that will kick off the season with a performance of Swan lake, and the director is looking for the dancer who can pull off both roles, that of the white swan and that of her nemesis, the black swan. (I am not a ballet fan, this is my simple understanding from viewing the movie.) Nina wants this role badly, but the director keeps telling her that she is too "controlled", trying too hard to be too precise instead of being more "real." Nina rarely smiles, it never seems like she is enjoying herself, at anything, at any time.
A new dancer from San Francisco shows up, Mila Kunis as Lily. It begins to look like Lily is competition for the role and Nina begins to become paranoid about her. Frenchman Vincent Cassel is good as Thomas Leroy, the director. Winona Ryder has a rather small role, as Beth Macintyre the former star now on her way out.
The DVD has interesting extras. Even though Portman has studied dance for most of her life, a professional ballerina was used for many of the performance scenes, and "face replacement" was used to make it look like Portman was dancing.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: As we view the movie we see some strange things, and in the end most of them turn out to be products of Nina's imagination, generated by her illness. She imagines an evening where Lily comes home with her, spends the night, and they have lesbian sex. She imagines another where Leroy tries to seduce her. And another where she kills Lily and drags her body into the shower of her dressing room. We see her looking into a mirror, black feather stubs are growing on her back, she pulls one out. (She is becoming, emotionally, the black swan.) In the very end, Nina turns loose, gives a good performance, but when she falls into the mattress behind the prop, as the dead white swan, we see she really is bleeding, she has stabbed herself and will die. But she smiled and said the performance "was perfect", she gave her life in her misguided search for perfection in the routine.