Great Story and Drama.
Every Psychological Students must read this or watch the movie.
I loved it.
Swan lake story:
Virginal girl,pure and sweet trapped in the body of a swan by a evil sorcerer. She desires freedom but that only true love can break the spell of the evil sorcerer.
Her wish is nearly granted in the form of prince. But before he declare his love to white swan, her lustful twin sister black swan tricks and seduces prince.
Devastated, the white swan leaps off the cliff, killing herself. And in death, finds freedom.
In the movie:
Nina (played by Natalie Portman) is a ballet dancer who always wants to be a swan queen (the lead role of the act). In the starting of the movie, she was seeing the poster of swan queen of her production house as obsessively as she always wanted her photo there.
But for the character of swan queen, dancer must play both the roles of gentle white swan and seductive black swan as they are twin sisters.
Nina is beautiful, fragile, and innocent. She has all the characteristic of white swan. If there had a role only for white swan then Nina was perfect casting for it. But black swan is seducing, dangerous, sexually aggressive and completely opposite of white swan.
Thomas, producer of the play, wanted these characteristics in her.
Nina has hallucination problem. She actually imagines her black swan character as seducing. At railways station, she first time sees her.
For the character of swan queen, her competition is new bold and confident dancer Lily (Mila Cunis) who could be the better choice for black swan. Thomas knows abilities of Nina but the attitude of black swan he wants in her, is not coming out of her. Still he gives her chance. He didn't want her to be fragile; he wants her seducing, aggressive. He knows role of white swan is not a problem but the real problem is how Nina would play black swan.
She always strives for the perfection. Thomas asks her to ‘lose herself’. He says, perfection is not only about control but it’s also about letting go.
From the moment she started dance, her long cherished dream was to be swan queen. She was actually dying to that role and when she gets it, she literally explodes in happiness.
Thomas don't want her to be weak. He wants her to come out of her self made restriction zone. He wants her to be expressive about her feelings.
The character of black swan has eaten up earlier swan queen Beth too as indicated by this scene.
She throws her toys as now she is not the same girls she used to be. She actually imagines her black swan character as Lily. It is interesting to see that she is fighting with herself as she is not able to distinguish between real and imagination (hallucination).
As what happens in Swan Lake story, is parallel happening in the movie. She wants Thomas to believe in her but she thinks Lily is seducing Thomas to get her role and Thomas is getting attracted towards her.
That feeling of jealousy, envy transforming her character. In due course of time, she is changing from white swan to black swan.
She is learning to oppose things.Here, first time she opposes her over protective mother to get out of her room. The character of black swan was eating her up.
She has transformed. She wants to end that black swan character developed in her. She ends that character by putting broken glass in her stomach. Stabbing in the mirror is her losing who she is and becoming swan where she fights good self against evil self.
Nina, as the White Swan, gets through the first scenes of the ballet okay but panics during the 'Dance of the Swans' when the faces on all the swans begin to look like hers, causing the Prince to drop her, which enrages Thomas. When the scene is over, she returns to her dressing room in tears and sees Lily seated at her vanity in costume for the Black Swan. Snottily, Lily offers to dance the Black Swan for her. Enraged, Nina yells, 'Leave me alone!' and smashes Lily (who has turned into the double) into a mirror, shattering it into bits. When the double tries suffocating her, Nina stabs her in the abdomen with a shard of mirror. She hides the body (who now looks like Lily again) in her bathroom and dresses for her turn as the Black Swan. Back onstage, Nina dances with abandon, wowing her partner as well as the audience. Suddenly, she begins to physically transform, her arms become black wings. As the audience gives her a standing ovation, Nina exits the stage, kisses Thomas passionately, and returns to her dressing room to change back into the dying White Swan, first covering up the blood on her floor with a towel. As she finishes with her makeup, she hears a knock at the door. It's Lily, alive and well, congratulating Nina on her amazing performance. When Lily is gone, Nina looks under the towel to find there is no blood. Suddenly, she becomes aware that she is bleeding from her abdomen and pulls out a shard of glass from the broken mirror. Despite her wound, Nina dances the last act until it becomes time for her to commit suicide. As she prepares to throw herself from the 'cliff', she looks out over the audience and sees her mother (Barbara Hershey), smiling and crying. As Nina falls onto the mattress below, the blood stain begins to widen. The audience erupts in thunderous applause. The rest of the dancers gather around her, and Thomas invites her to take her bows. 'My little princess,' he says, 'I always knew you had it in you.' Suddenly, Lily gasps, and the blood stain can be seen across Nina's entire abdomen. Thomas calls for help and asks Nina what she did. 'I felt it,' she replies. 'It was perfect.' The crowd continues to roar with applause as the screen slowly fades to white.
Climax- Nina actually dies is left unanswered. Thomas calls for help, and the screen slowly fades to white, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether or not Nina survives. A least literal explanation is that, if we accept that the whole story is a metaphor of growing up, then she doesn't have to die. Since the mother of Nina has always affected her, Nina was prevented from growing up in order to keep her disciplined, which helps her to be perfect (e.g. after her metamorphosis, she mistakes in a part at the show)