Summary
Billy eventually successfully lands a pirouette, smiling proudly. Even then, however, Sandra scolds him about his arm, and his face falls in disappointment. On her way out, she winks at him to let him know she is proud of him. The accompanist then comes up behind him and says, "You look like a right wanker to me, son."
On his way home from class, Billy dances and bounds down the street triumphantly. At the miner's strike, the boxing instructor tells Jackie that he hasn't seen Billy for months. "Send him round to my house. I'll sure enough knock some sense into him," says the boxing instructor, and Jackie looks concerned.
Shots of the strike are interspersed with shots of Billy Elliot in ballet class. Later, Jackie and Tony are at the store and Jackie asks his older son if he's noticed anything weird about Billy. Suddenly, Tony spots his best friend, who crossed the picket line, and fights with him about how much food he has in his cart and his betrayal of the miners.
The next morning, Billy sneaks out of his house, pretending to go to boxing. As he leaves the house, Jackie comes out of the bathroom frustrated with his son's evasiveness. In the middle of ballet class, Jackie comes in and sees his son dancing with all the girls. When he spots his father, Billy's eyes widen in fear and shame. Jackie yells at Billy angrily to leave the class, much to the chagrin of Sandra. Billy obeys, and goes outside to talk to his father.
"What's wrong with ballet? It's perfectly normal," Billy says to his father when they sit down together for a meal. Billy's grandmother chimes in and tells Jackie that she used to go to ballet, but Jackie insists that boys don't do ballet. "I don't see what's wrong with it!" says Billy, upset, but Jackie is insistent that Billy stay home and watch his grandmother rather than waste his time dancing. "They used to say I could have been a professional dancer if I'd had the training!" says the grandmother and Jackie yells at her to shut up.
Angry, Billy calls his father a bastard and flees the house, running down the road and throwing a tantrum. Later, he wanders to Sandra's house, ringing the doorbell. When she answers the door, she tells him to stand up to his father, but he insists that he cannot. She invites Billy in and he talks to her husband, Tom. Tom alludes to the fact that Billy's father is a miner and on strike, and suggests that the strikes are impractical—"just a couple commies stirring things up." Billy asks, "What do you do, Mr. Wilkinson?" and Debbie says, "He's been made redundant."
In her room, Debbie tells Billy that her father is under a lot of pressure, that he drinks too much, and that he and Sandra sleep in different beds. As she watches an automated ballerina statuette turn and turn, Debbie tells Billy that her father had an affair, but that her parents don't think that she knows about it. Sitting beside Billy, Debbie asks if he misses his mother, and he tells her that it makes him sad sometimes. The two of them have a pillow fight, and Billy eventually ends up perched above Debbie as she touches his face tenderly. All of a sudden, Sandra calls to Billy to bring him home.
When she drops him off at the corner, Billy asks Sandra, "Miss, what have I blown?" and she tells him that she had hoped he might audition for the Royal Ballet School. He insists that he wouldn't be good enough, but Sandra tells him that they would teach him to dance, and the auditions would be more about seeing how he moves and how he expresses himself.
"But I'm banned," Billy says, and Sandra tells him that she would teach him herself. When he counters, "What about boxing?" Sandra gets angry, insisting that he has real potential as a dancer and he ought to take it seriously. She tells him she'll teach him privately and he asks if she fancies him. "Funnily enough I don't," Sandra says, smirking, and tells him to "piss off."
Billy goes to Michael's house and knocks on the door. Michael answers the door in a dress, which surprises Billy, and they both go inside. Inside, Michael tells him that he wears his sister's dresses when she's out, but she doesn't know, and he puts on some lipstick in the mirror. Billy closes the door and looks confused, as Michael sits him down on the bed and puts lipstick on him. "Won't we get in trouble?" says Billy, but Michael insists that it's fine and his father does it when he thinks everyone is out of the house.
"Do you think being a ballet dancer would be better than being a miner?" Billy asks Michael, telling him that he's going to audition for ballet school that would take him to London if he got in. "Can't you be a ballet dancer here?" Michael asks, to which Billy responds, "Don't be stupid!" Billy tells Michael that his father doesn't know, and Michael tells him that he ought not to audition since he would miss him.
Billy goes to rehearse with Sandra alone at the gym, who has asked him to bring in objects that are special to him as a way of inspiring a dance. He shows her the objects, which include a letter from his mother. He hands Sandra the letter and she reads it aloud: "Dear Billy: I know I must seem like a distant memory to you, which is probably a good thing. It will have been a long time...and I will have missed seeing you grow, missed you crying, laughing and shouting and..." Billy takes over reciting the letter, having memorized it, "I will have missed telling you off. But please know that I was always there with you through everything. And I always will be. And I am proud to have known you. And I'm proud that you were mine. Always be yourself. I'll love you forever."
He hands her a tape of her brother's, T. Rex, and he and Sandra dance to it. Shots of Billy dancing with Sandra are interspersed with shots of Tony listening to it at home, and his grandmother doing ballet moves against the wall in the living room.
Analysis
As Billy becomes more and more involved in ballet class, his ambitions grow and he works harder and harder to become successful at dance. We see a montage of him practicing a pirouette—in class, in his bedroom, hidden away in the bathroom at home. While his desire to dance might be strong, he is sometimes still quite clumsy, his body betraying an as-yet-unachieved dream of gracefulness.
Billy's ambitions are raised even higher by the high standards of his difficult-to-please ballet instructor, Sandra, who alternates between secretive encouragement and public disappointment. She is hard on Billy because she sees so much potential in him, and she wants him to become a great dancer. When he lands a pirouette in her class, instead of encouraging him, she immediately scolds him for his form in his arm, then sneaks him a wink on her way out of the class. Her belief in him, in combination with her high standards, are what propel Billy to keep practicing and excelling.
The contrast between Billy and the men in his family is heightened now by their starkly contrasting experiences, and director Stephen Daldry heightens this contrast in the way that he portrays Billy's ascension in ballet class. After the boxing instructor tells Jackie Elliot that Billy hasn't been coming to class, we see shots of Billy in the center of a cluster of girls in tutus, interspersed with images of the heated and violent strikes going on at the mines. Placed beside one another, the discrepancy between the contentious and hyper-masculine working life of Jackie and Tony and the more fanciful and artistic inclinations of Billy is put into perspective. This discrepancy raises the tensions, as we wonder what the community's reaction to Billy's interest will be.
Jackie's discovery of Billy's inclination for dance is indeed catastrophic, and he pulls Billy out of class, insisting that boys are not meant to dance ballet. His protestations are twofold: he does not think that his son should dance ballet on the basis of his gender, and he also thinks it's inappropriate on the basis of class. According to his logic, the problem is not only, who ever heard of a boy ballet dancer, it's also, who ever heard of a miner's son who was a ballet dancer. The Elliots' working-class status and the precariousness of their financial situation only makes the thought of ballet that much more impractical and untenable.
With no mother to encourage him in his artistic pursuits, Billy turns to Sandra Wilkison, who, while not exactly maternal, nurtures Billy's creative impulse. She is a chain-smoking, toughened woman who curses liberally in front of her students, but her toughness also informs her belief in Billy, her stubborn belief that he has something special. Additionally, as we learn in this section of the film, Sandra is herself unfulfilled at home, and her tutelage of Billy provides inspiration and fulfillment for her as well.
