This is not Black Swan.

When Black Swan premiered in 2010, some audience members pointed out similarities to the well-known anime Perfect Blue. A smaller number of people pointed out similarities to a different film.

ÉTOILE (1989) was directed by Italian filmmaker Peter Del Monte, shot on location in Budapest and Italy in 1988 under the working title Ballerina.

The film is a loose supernatural retelling of Swan Lake in which a young American dancer arrives in Hungary to audition for a prestigious ballet academy and discovers that its reclusive choreographer believes her to be the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century principal dancer who fled the company and died in a carriage accident.

Aronofsky's film covered much of the same thematic ground: the identity fracture induced by dancing the lead in Swan Lake, the dancers' relationship to ballet as something approaching religious devotion, the mentor whose investment in his dancer crosses into something darker.

Jennifer Connelly was seventeen when this was filmed. Four years earlier she had appeared in Dario Argento's Phenomena, playing a girl with a psychic connection to insects who investigates murders at a Swiss boarding school.

Whether Aronofsky had seen Étoile before making Black Swan is not known. The films are different enough that the comparison flatters both without diminishing either.