Black Swan (2010)

I'm a late comer to this film, which somehow has managed to remain mostly unspoiled for me prior to finally watching it last week. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her work here, an honor she very much earned. She plays such an obsessed, and tightly wound character, a virginal, repressed lesbian who is losing her mind (come to think of it all Darren Aronofosky films are about characters who are slowly losing their  minds, to one extent or the other). Portman plays Nina Sayers, a working ballerina at  a prestigious New York company who at 28 has never been cast as a lead, her talented but slightly lecherous director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel, very good) takes a risk at casting her as the lead in his new production of the much done Swan Lake. Leroy wants to get more out of Sayers performance then she's ever been able to give before, and given her frightened, reserved nature it seems impossible that she will be able to play the erotically tinged part of the Black Swan in the ballet, though as Cassel notes her playing the dual part of the virginal White Swan, will not be a problem for her.

All this stress doesn't help the perfectionist Sayers, whose suffering some undiagnosed mental issues, including paranoia. She has a love/hate obsession with a new ballerina in the company played by Mila Kunis (good in a rare serious part), and as the film progresses her obsessions, a number of them, grow greater, and her mind starts playing tricks on here. The mental descent of Ms. Sayers is done wonderfully well, its truly unsettling and creepy. This owes mostly to Ms. Portman's remarkable performance in the part, but is aided as well by visual effects, sometimes subtly done, that aid in conveying the characters sense of things coming unhinged. As we are seeing things through Nina's eyes in the film sometimes we'll see things that turn out to be hallucinations, but we can't be sure if what we are seeing is really happening or not until later events in the film either confirm or deny that they really took place.

Director Aronofosky has taken elements from the story of Swan Lake and overlade them on the story of characters mounting a production of Swan Lake, and he's done so in such a way as to create a supremely well crafted piece of psychological horror that is utterly riveting and inventive. This movie left me feeling truly awed.. ****