Saturday, February 12, 2011

but which of you can embody both swans? the white and the black.

So I saw Black Swan yesterday. And I have to admit. It was very very good. I liked it a lot. My heart was poundingggggg at the end of it. Like when the credits started rolling, my friend and I just looked at each other like WHAT JUST HAPPENED.

Basically, the premise is that this girl Nina is a ballet dancer, and upon getting chosen as the lead for her troupe's production of Swan Lake, gets so overwhelmed with the pressure, that she goes crazy. Literally. But there were a lot of things going on in it besides that. The big thing with Nina playing the lead role, is that although she plays the white swan perfectly, she can't seem to get the black swan just right. As Thomas (pronounced To-ma), the ballet director says, "The truth is, when I look at you all I see is the white swan. Yes, you're beautiful, fearful, and fragile. Ideal casting. But the black swan? It's a hard f*cking job to dance both." So also in this movie you really see Nina evolving from the white swan to the black swan. And at the same time as this, Lily, a new dancer from San Francisco, also comes into play. Lily's personality is like the black swan, so at first the image is Nina as the white swan and Lily as the black swan. They even have Nina wearing white all the time, and Lily wearing black. But as the movie progresses, this obviously changes because Nina too, with Lily's influence, becomes like the black swan herself.

There was just so much going on in this movie, and I don't really want to spoil anything for anyone. But there is just so much that I would love to say. Like my theories for what really set Nina off, what really made her break down. Obviously in the beginning she wasn't entirely normal, but she REALLY went off on the deep end by the end.

So here are the many things I think came into play. This won't spoil the ending, at all, but you might not want to read it anyway, because it does go into specifics for certain things. It's not that big of a deal in any case. I would read it if I were you, but if you're one of those people that can't have ANYTHING given away, then don't read the next paragraph.

Okay. The first component to Nina-going-crazy is obviously the career she's in. Being a ballet dancer isn't easy. There's a LOT of pressure. Also, Nina doesn't really have a life. She's sexually repressed, and it only makes it worse when Thomas basically starts hitting on her. Because he keeps like kissing her and feeling her up and saying stuff to her, and even though some of it actually might be to make her a better dancer (I know that sounds crazy, but you have to see it to understand), it kind of screws with her head, because she actually starts becoming very attracted to him, but she doesn't know how to express it. There's also this weird thing with Lily. Nina gets deluded into thinking Lily is after her role, but actually Lily seems to be a pretty nice person. But even before that, well let's just say it seems like Nina has a little crush on Lily, but again this might just be her being sexually repressed, so she's confused about her feelings. The final thing that sends Nina off into the deep end is her mother. Now, Nina's mother seems to be a very nice lady, but the problem is that she really babies her. I'm pretty sure Nina is supposed to be about college age (obviously she doesn't go to college because she's a ballerina), so why should her mother be cutting her fingernails for her? I mean Nina still calls her Mommy. Come on. So put all of these things together, and you get the delusional crazy person that Nina becomes. It's really too bad though, because she was a nice person in the beginning.

In conclusion, Black Swan was a very good movie. And though I love Inception to DEATH, I think it might beat it to win the Oscar.

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