On the couch

“Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.”
If Natalie Portman didn’t finish shooting Black Swan curled up in her tutu in somebody’s closet, chanting those words over and over then I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
Winner of five Academy awards, including gongs for best actress and best director, Aronofsky’s story of a ballerina who fights both her professional rivals and her own sanity while rehearsing for the role of her life – the lead in Swan Lake – is both more approachable and more unnerving than you might think it would be.
There are so many moments in Black Swan that will have you lurching out of your seat or squinting at the screen through the cracks in your fingers that you could easily mistake it for a horror movie. And, while it is indeed horrific, to think of it only as that would be to limit the scope of your enjoyment of the flick.
There are layers of possibility here that can be peeled back or pondered on to almost Inception-like levels. While Christopher Nolan has mastered the high-wire act of making edgy films that are both critically and commercially successful, Aronofsky’s work is still almost wilfully dismissive of approval.
As it happens, his films make money and sometimes sense, but for every Wrestler and Black Swan, there’s an inspired but unfathomable Requiem for a Dream or the just plain unfathomable The Fountain.
Black Swan is a small, tightly told tale that could’ve been transposed to number of different settings, from a B-movie set to an office but the layers added by both Aronofsky and the performers turn it into one of those films you’ll be able to talk about, argue over and debate for hours after the credits roll.
Portman is the mentally fragile ingenué trying to make the best of her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity while coping with office politics, performance anxiety and a long-smouldering grudge with her mother.
Vincent Cassell is the morally ambiguous boss, Thomas, who may or may not have our heroine’s best interests at heart and Mila Kunis is the “other” woman, Lily – is she out to sabotage Nina or does she really just want to be friends?
Making matters infinitely more complicated and interesting is the question of Nina’s mental state. Is she simply a sheltered innocent trying to cope with her chaged circumstances and the machinations of her director and the new girl in town? Or is she actually nuts and everything we see should be questioned as though it were a figment of someone’s imagination?
It’s like a soap opera storyline filmed with a brilliant cast by an ingenious director.
Portman shines as Nina. The dancer’s slavish pursuit of perfection makes her a technically excellent but emotionally unavailable performer and a difficult character to empathise with. It’s a frustrating, fascinating, compelling performance and well deserving of its accolades.
Cassell, meanwhile, plays his usual role of  a slightly sleazy Euro-trash type whose motives are murky. He sometimes looks like a cobra turned used car salesman but is, as always, very watchable.
Probably most surprisingly is that more of a fuss wasn’t made out of Mila Kunis’s performance. The Family Guy alum more than holds her own with Portman and makes Lily a complicated and beguiling figure despite limited screen time.
Also featuring in small roles are Barbara Hershey as Nina’s domineering mother and Winona Ryder as the former prima ballerina with an axe to grind with Thomas.
Black Swan’s shocks and squirm-inducing moments come not only from Nina’s self-abusive antics (fingernails and feathers? Really?) but from the story itself which succeeds in keeping viewers off-balance by doing very little of what is expected of it.
One thing you can expect, however, is to be entertained.