Tag: Barbara Hershey

The Right Stuff (1983)

Patriotic heroism subtly retold as shrewd satire – no wonder the film bombed

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Kim Stanley (Pancho Barnes), Veronica Cartwright (Betty Grissom), Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton), Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henriksen (Wally Schirra), Donald Moffat (Lyndon B Johnson), Levon Helm (Jack Ridley), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Scott Wilson (Scott Crossfield), Kathy Baker (Louise Shepard), David Clennon (Liaison man), Jeff Goldblum (Recruiter), Harry Shearer (Recruiter)

During the Cold War, the US and Russia had to fight with something – from proxy wars to chess, but most famously with Space: the competition to go further, faster and higher among the stars. The Right Stuff focuses on the Mercury Seven pilots at the centre of the US response to Soviet success including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), a mix of the cocksure and the confident. But in a space programme where a monkey is an acceptable “pilot” for this human cannonball, do any of them have “the right stuff”? Could any of them match the skill of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) – one of the guys who scorned this astronaut programme for being “spam in a can”?

The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book, seemed destined to become a patriotic smash-hit. Despite its eight Oscar nominations (and four wins) it was, in fact, a catastrophic bomb. Perhaps that was because it subverted its patriotism so well. The Right Stuff is, in fact, a subtle, anti-heroic satire (told at huge length) masquerading as a patriotic yarn. It’s marketing avoided that meaning those most likely to enjoy didn’t go and see it, and those who went for that felt alienated. While largely respecting the astronauts, it suggests space race triumphalism was a sort of mass hysteria, with limited results, inflated into something mythic by political expediency, media spin and industrial might. Not the happy, flag-waving message Reaganite America expected or wanted.

Kaufman’s sympathy instead lies with an older, “truer” America. The Right Stuff is an intensely nostalgic film: but for a completely different time. It is in love with Frontier America, where men-were-men and the daring proved themselves in taming the frontier, in this case the sky itself. Our tamer is Chuck Yeager, played with a monosyllabic Gary-Cooper-charisma by Sam Shepard. Yeager is the last of the cowboys (even introduced riding a horse in the desert), taking to the skies like an old frontiersman hunting down that “demon” who lives at the sound barrier.

This is the sort of America The Right Stuff celebrates, and Yeager is the guy who has it. Unlike the Mercury programme, Yeager isn’t interested in showbiz and self-promotion (his reward for breaking the sound barrier? A free steak and a press embargo), just the quiet satisfaction of having done it. It’s the old, unflappable, quietly masculine confidence of a certain kind of American tradition and it’s totally out of step with the world the media is now celebrating with the astronauts. Instead, these effective passengers in the rocket will be hailed as the great pilots.

Kaufman’s film is a long, carefully disguised, quiet ridicule of many of the aspects of the Mercury programme. It’s conceived, in a darkened room, by a group of politicians so clumsy they can’t even work a projector. It’s head, Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffat on panto form) is a ludicrous figure, at one point reduced to an impotent tantrum in a car when he doesn’t get his way. The NASA recruiters are a comedy double act – Goldblum and Shearer sparking wonderfully off each other – who first suggest (in all seriousness) circus acrobats as pilots and then fail to identify Yuri Gargarin. The programme begins with a series of failed launches that travel tiny distances before exploding, culminating in one attempt ending with an impotent pop of the cap at the top of the rocket.

NASA is slightly ramshackle and clueless throughout. Far from the best and brightest, Kaufman is keen for us to remember that many of the scientists fought for the Germans in the war, that decisions were often made entirely based on what the Russians have just done, that the astronaut recruitment tests are a parade of bizarre physical tests because no one has a clue what to test for, and that the final seven selected aren’t even the best just the ones who persevered through the tests and (crucially) were small enough to fit in the capsule. That doesn’t stop the media – played by a San Francisco physical comedy troop – from turning them overnight from jobbing pilots to superstars.

The astronauts status is frequently punctured. Scott Glenn’s granite-faced Shepard is strapped into the cockpit for hours on his first flight, until finally he begs to pee (followed by a montage of coffee being slurped, hose pipes blasting and taps dripping) before being instructed to release his bladder into his suit, meaning he heads into space sitting in a puddle of his own piss. Dennis Quaid’s cocksure Cooper has an over-inflated idea of his skills and is prone to dumb, blow-hard statements (arriving at Yeager’s Air Force base he non-ironically states he’ll soon have his picture up on the deceased pilot’s memorial wall). Fred Ward’s Gus Grissom is a slightly sleazy chancer – controversially The Right Stuff presents him as panicking on re-entry from his first mission, blowing his hatch and sinking his ship, something he categorically denied (and was later proved not to have done).

Even John Glenn, played with a sincerity and decency by Ed Harris (if this had been a hit, Harris’ career of playing hard-heard would have been totally different), is subtly lampooned. So straight-laced he literally can’t swear (his attempt to say ‘fuck’ never gets past a strained Ffff), he’s introduced via a ludicrous TV quiz show and his square-jawed morals frequently tip into puritan self-importance. Undergoing physical tests, Kaufman even cuts from his grimacing face to a grinning chimp on the same test (and who will beat him into space). Compared to Yeager, who can correct a plane on a desperate nose dive and beat the skies into submission (and has the only outright heroic refrain in Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score), none of them have that right stuff.

Do they get it? In a way: but their triumph is establishing their character, not their skills. Kaufman uses Yeager to point us towards this (his seal of approval is vital for the film): after Grissom’s debacle, he defends him in the bar and praises their courage in essentially sitting on top of a massive bomb.
Tellingly, the astronauts’ most courageous moment in the film isn’t in the cockpit at all: it’s Glenn supporting his stammering wife’s refusal to go on air with LBJ, despite the pressure from NASA bigwigs – and the other astronauts uniting in fury when Glenn is threatened with being dumped from the next flight. The others become more noble through maturing and casting aside fame’s temptations.

In a way they prove their spurs, even if Kaufman’s film makes clear none of them can match Yeager’s traditional values. The film ends with Yeager, maverick to the last, undertaking an unauthorised test flight in a desperate attempt to keep funding for his jet programme going. Even with this final flight – dressed in a bastardised version of a space suit – Yeager shows he’s not lost it, a man so undeniably superhuman in his American resilience that even a bit of fire won’t slow him down.

The Right Stuff celebrates Yeager, but he’s the B-story – and the film frames him as a forgotten figure, left behind by a world obsessed with the bright and shiny. The Right Stuff has to centre the astronauts but it doesn’t focus on the missions (which, apart from Glenn’s, barely receive any screen time – certainly not compared to the time given to Yeager’s flights) or the glory, only quietly implies there was a slight air of pointlessness about the whole thing – that the space race was perhaps just a dick-waggling competition between superpowers. It makes for interesting – if overlong – viewing, but as punch-the-air entertainment, no sir. No wonder it bombed.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Willem Dafoe plays the Son of God in Scorsese’s supremely controversial The Last Temptation of Christ

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Willem Dafoe (Jesus Christ), Harvey Keitel (Judas), Barbara Hershey (Mary Magdalene), Harry Dean Stanton (Saul), David Bowie (Pontius Pilate), Verna Bloom (Mary), Barry Miller (Jeroboam). Irvin Kershner (Zebedee), Victor Argo (Peter), Andre Gregory (John the Baptist), Nehemiah Persoff (Rabbi), Tomas Arana (Lazarus), Gary Barsaraba (Andrew), Juliette Caton (Girl Angel)

There are few films as controversial as this. Scorsese’s earthy adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ has lived its whole life under the shadow of the parade of traditionalists, conservatives and evangelists who have called for everything from the negative being destroyed to the death of its director. All this is rooted in the film’s quest – as in the book – for the human in Jesus, the saviour who was both mortal and divine. As part of this, it showed him expressing anger, doubt and of course, presented him with temptation and threw him into the dirty, working-class world where he made his ministry.

The film follows the life of Jesus (Willem Dafoe) pretty much as per the Gospels, with several interjections and reinterpretations (some of which seem designed to piss off the faithful). We meet Jesus as a carpenter who crafts crosses for Roman crucifixions by day, plagued by voices and fits at night. He knows he has a purpose but is scared of what it might be. Eventually he finds it, encouraged by Judas (Harvey Keitel) his most faithful disciple and a passionate campaigner against the Romans. The last temptation itself fills the final act of the film. On the cross, a disguised Satan comes to Jesus and offers him the chance to leave behind being the messiah and live a normal life: marriage, children and content old age surrounded by family.

The Last Temptation of Christ is Scorsese’s wrestling with his faith. It’s a highly personal, defiantly modern and daring version of the gospels that strongly invests in the notion that true faith is only possible if we also have doubt to overcome. And it applies this logic to Jesus, who is shown here as far more grounded, human and flawed than He has ever been in the movies (or anywhere else). Voiceovers communicate His constant doubts and insecurities – and even His resentments about not understanding what God intends for him.

Where other Biblical epics are old, stodgy and stiff, The Last Temptation profoundly challenges its viewers. This is not a picture postcard world. Jesus’ surroundings are humble and dirty. His disciples are simple men – Judas, the only one with any form of intellect, attacks them as clueless yes-men. But it’s a film that stresses the humanity of Jesus. It wants us to admire him even more, because He needed to overcome the same internal demons we all confront. This is not a saviour unbent in purpose, but battling always. It asks us to try and relate ourself to Jesus in a new way, to ask how we might have felt and whether we would have been strong enough to take on that mantle.

Played with extraordinary passion and fire by Willem Dafoe, this is a Jesus who is scared, reluctant, shows flashes of bitterness and anger but struggles to put all this aside to embrace His destiny and purpose as the Messiah. On other words, He’s far more human than we’ve seen before. He’s also rough and unprepared, in many ways, for His ministry. We see His first attempt at preaching – having, with half-confidence, half-apprehension told Judas He’s sure God will give Him the words – which is carefree, impassioned and amateurish but full of inspirational fire. He doesn’t quite convey the message He’s aiming for, but it is enough to win the devotion of several of the men who will become his disciples.

Scorsese shoots this, as he shoots many of the scenes among the crowds, with an immediacy and urgency, using a mobile camera and throwing us in among those listening to Jesus’ words. John the Baptist’s ministry by the lake is a near-orgy of religious ecstasy (with added nudity), full of wild emotion and jubilant singing – all of which drops out on the soundtrack to just the lapping of the river, as Judas and John meet. (It’s a brilliant moment that shows the world-stopping impact of revelation). Scorsese mixes this with scenes of a spiritual stillness and gentle mysticism. During his time in the desert – during which Jesus sits inside a perfect circle, which He draws free hand in the dirt – He encounters, in scenes of haunting unknowability, temptation from Satan in the form of a snake, a lion and a jet of fire.

It’s a starting point for Jesus’ embarking on a series of miracles and world-changing preaching. Controversially, even now, He is still uncertain of what He is meant to – he tells Judas (who remains a constant confidante) that God only gives Him small parts of the total picture as He needs them. He comes from the desert inviting his disciples to war – against Satan, and to bring God’s word to the world. It seems another provocative image – Jesus brandishing an axe in one hand, His own heart (plucked from His chest before the disciples) in the other – and it’s one of the points in the film where I feel Scorsese overplays his hand. I’m not quite sure what he is suggesting here, as Jesus calls his disciples to war, unless it’s a campaign of muscular Christianity.

It competes with several other images and sequences that infuriated many. Some of these are too much: Jesus crafting crosses and even helping the Romans (in the film’s opening) nail a victim too one is far too much, a tasteless attempt to show a flawed man. Waiting to apologise to Mary Magdalene (a delicate Barbara Hershey) for his part in this, He sits while she services a roomful of men one after another. Moments like this always feel a little too much, even if it’s a more genuine insight into what Mary Magdelene’s life was actually like than we normally get.

But the Temptation itself is fascinating and moving – if a little too long. There was of course outrage at seeing Jesus marry and make love to Mary Magdelene, rejecting his purpose for a life of normality. Surely, if Jesus could be tempted by anything it might have been this: the man who never knew a moment of the life you and I lead, given a chance to experience it. With Satan – passing himself off as a young female guardian angel – guiding him, the vision sees Jesus age into an old man. Satan presents a plausible argument: man and Earth can live in a simple happiness, if they forget the demands of God in heaven.

The very idea of Jesus either deceived by Satan for a time – or seriously considering abandoning His divine purpose – is anathema to many, but again it re-enforces Scorsese’s view that doubt is essential for faith. That we can only commit the supreme act of commitment to God, if we are uncertain about doing it in the first place. And Jesus’ re-devotion at the end to his mission truly gives a sense of “It is being accomplished” in a way few other films have managed.

Ideas like this – and the earthy, vigorous nature of Jesus’ world – dominate the film and dare and push the viewer. Dafoe is superb – and Harvey Keitel excellent as a politically committed Judas, here not betraying Jesus, but taking on the harder role (that of betrayer – Jesus even tells him he is not strong enough for such a role, so has the easier part in dying). It’s shot with a brilliant modernism and has a superb score from Peter Gabriel, stuffed with lyrical etherealism and making use of several contemporary instruments. It sometimes overplays its hand, but as a personal work of a director juggling his own doubts, fears and faith on screen, it’s perhaps one of the most extraordinary religious films ever made.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest are Hannah and Her Sisters one of Allen’s finest films

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Woody Allen (Mickey), Michael Caine (Elliot), Mia Farrow (Hannah), Carrie Fisher (April), Barbara Hershey (Lee), Lloyd Nolan (Evan), Maureen O’Sullivan (Norman), Daniel Stern (Dusty), Max von Sydow (Frederick), Dianne Wiest (Holly), Sam Waterston (David)

Hannah (Mia Farrow) is divorced from Mickey (Woody Allen) and happily married to Elliot (Michael Caine). Eliot is in love with Lee (Barbara Hershey). Lee is Hannah’s sister. Holly (Dianne Wiest) is considering dating Mickey. Holly is also Hannah’s sister. This whirligig of relationships is the heart of Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s finest and certainly most humane films. Witty and heartfelt, it’s one of his sharpest scripts, crammed with acute observation and fine gags and is directed with a coolly introspective eye.

Allen splits the film into multiple sections, each opening (like the chapter of a novel) with a quote from the scene we are about to watch. Music plucked from Allen’s beloved classics (most often, and fittingly considering its romance theme, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered) frequently bridge scenes. Internal monologues is used often to allow us to explore the inner lives of the characters (the actors do a marvellous job reacting on screen to this internal thought process we are hearing).

The film uses a host of inspirations carefully mixed into Allen’s Manhattan Metropolitan middle-class milieu. The entire film has an autumnal Chekovian feel to it, with a rich sense of lives continuing ‘off stage’ as much as on. While the title obviously echoes Three Sisters, it’s study of romantic and intellectual entanglements overlaps with Chekov, as does the film’s love of wordplay. There are also, of course, echoes of Bergman (with gags) both in the film’s episodic structure but also its framing device of three Thanksgivings dinners, reflecting Bergman’s triumphant Fanny and Alexander.

The most effective thing about the film, in addition to its wit, is the surprising warmth it feels for the characters. Not always in an Allen film does one find the sympathy and empathy so widely spread – there is usually at least one character who is the target for the writer’s scorn. But here, no major character is presented as either the butt of snide humour or sneers. Even von Sydow’s pretentious artist is capable of searing emotional pain, and its hard not to sympathise with him as clients enquire whether his art will fit with their home décor. Each scene carefully balances the perspectives of multiple characters to allow us to relate to what each of them is going through. It’s possibly the largest cast of fully-rounded characters in an Allen film, and his most generous film.

It’s a film that avoids judgement over its characters, despite the frequently terrible and morally troubling things they do. It’s a film that understands the heart is an uncontrollable but resilient muscle, which doesn’t always guide us to the right or the easy things. Of course today, with Allen, you think it’s probably not a surprise he had sympathy with a group of people engaged in relationships that often involve profoundly betraying others. But at least her understands the irresistible urge people have to continue doing things they shouldn’t.

It’s hard not to overlook that the film’s least explored character (despite her multi-layered performance) is Mia Farrow’s Hannah. Poor Hannah, the still, moral centre of the film, is betrayed by both her husband and her sister (to their mutual guilt). Allen leaves her in ignorance – even though she knows something is wrong – and while Allen acknowledges what Elliot and Lee is doing is wrong, he mitigates things by making clear Hannah’s decency and generosity makes her overwhelming. While we see the impact a sudden distance from her husband has on Hannah (in a great shot she talks to him while he is off camera in another room, making her look like she is talking to a wall), Hannah is one of the few characters we don’t get the insight of an internal monologue for, and that feels like an easier way for Allen to maintain our sympathies for others.

The person whose internal monologue we hear the most is her conflicted husband Elliot. Hannah and Her Sisters may be unique in that it has two characters who are clear Allen substitutes. While Allen plays one, Caine is the husband (who looks alarmingly like a prediction of future developments in the Allen-Farrow relationship). Caine is superb, not least because he turns lines you can hear could be delivered with an Allenesque twitchiness, into ones crammed with utter emotional genuineness.

For all that he is a cheat, Elliot is strangely guileless and rather sweet, plagued with guilt and also giddy as a schoolboy, begging Lee to read an ee cummings poem that carries special meaning for him. Caine makes Elliot a genuine human character, a flawed man trying to avoid hurting people (but causing pain everywhere). If Branagh in Celebrity (with his distracting Allen imitation) showed how much of a slave to Allenesque delivery you can become, Caine shows how heartfelt simplicity and underplaying can bring out deeper emotion from Allen’s dialogue. Allen also rather brilliantly directs this abashed dance of attraction: from Caine’s internal monologue telling him to play it cool, moments before he kisses Lee, to the camera framing Frederick’s sketches of a naked Lee directly in Elliot’s line of sight while he tries to think of literally anything else.

Caine also matches superbly with Barbara Hershey, excellent as a woman who feels trapped in her life and drawn to Elliot despite herself. Lee’s current relationship is with Frederick, wittily played in a near parody of Bergmanesque brooding by Max von Sydow, who takes a late lurch into real vulnerability, a pretentious artist who is part-lover-part-tutor and is disconnected from the real world, Lee is virtually his only link left with it. Frederick is clearly a tutor and surrogate parent, as much as a lover to Lee – and that attraction to a figure who can take responsibility in her life is clearly something she’s attracted in Elliot. The slow, guilt-ridden coming together of Elliot and Lee – and the slow deflation of this fling – is the emotional heart of the movie.

The film’s other two arcs provide more of the gags. Woody Allen gifts himself some of his finest comic moments as Hannah’s hypochondriac ex-husband (the second Allen stand-in) undergoing an existential crisis after he discovers he is in fact not dying of a terminal disease. Dianne Wiest is similarly excellent (and also Oscar winning) as Hannah’s unsuccessful sister Holly, a would-be actress too insecure to find success. Wiest is not only funny, but also vulnerable and affecting, as she tries to find her place in the world. In many ways Wiest plays a third version of Allen here, as she becomes a neurotic writer channelling her real life into writing (to the consternation of her sister).

Changing reality into scripts is the only thing awkward about Hannah and Her Sisters today. Hannah and her extended family (and many children) are a thinly veiled portrait of Farrow’s own family (Hannah’s mother is even played by Farrow’s real life mother Maureen O’Sullivan). Like Allen and Farrow, Mickey and Hannah needed to adopt and foster children. And of course Eliot’s affair with Hannah’s sister eerily mirrors Allen’s own affair with Farrow’s adopted daughter, and the film’s sympathy for Elliot sometimes seems like an unsettling excusing of Allen’s future conduct. That’s not even mentioning one of the film’s earliest jokes is Allen’s character complaining about the cutting of a child molestation skit from his Saturday Night Live-ish show (“what’s the problem half the country’s doing it” quips Allen, a joke that doesn’t work today for so many reasons).

But put that aside because, whatever your opinion of Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters is one of his finest films. It’s expertly shot and directed with a real unobtrusive ease (Allen’s innate understanding of this Manhattan world contrasts sharply with how at sea he is in his European movies). The acting is spot on. As well as being very funny, the moral conundrums the film explores are sympathetic and witty, as are the flawed human beings behind them. Possibly his best film.

Black Swan (2010)

Natalie Portman in the intense world of ballet in Aronofsky’s crazy masterpiece Black Swan

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers), Mila Kunis (Lily), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy), Barbara Hershey (Erica Sayers), Winona Ryder (Beth MacIntyre), Benjamin Millepied (David Moreau), Ksenia Solo (Veronica), Kristina Anapau (Galina), Janet Montgomery (Madeline), Sebastian Stan (Andrew)

Something about ballet just makes people think of obsession. Many dancers criticised Black Swan for perpetuating myths about the dangerous psychology, the quest for perfection, the personal life imbalance connected with the all-consuming art ballet seems to be. It’s hard not to agree with them – but that doesn’t mean Black Swan isn’t unsettling, creepy and hypnotic film-making.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is an obsessive member of the New York Ballet, focused on achieving perfection and lives a sheltered, barely adult life at home, dominated by her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey). With the forced retirement of company lead Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder), Diagheliv-style director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) selects Nina to play the dual role lead of white and black swan in Swan Lake. Leroy feels she is perfect for the innocent white swan, but needs to work on the sensual black swan. Increasingly feeling the pressure of playing the role under the demanding Leroy – and growing increasingly preoccupied with her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) – Nina’s fragile psyche begins to fracture.

Black Swan is a mesmerising mixture of psychological drama, melodrama, Cronenberg-style body horror, unreliable narration and immersion into a pressure-cooker world. It’s often difficult to watch, sometimes maddeningly over-blown, and overly tricksy in its intense visual style. But despite that, it’s actually compellingly watchable, an audacious tight-rope walk between style and substance that constantly feels like it’s going to get lost in its extremes but never does.

Aronofsky’s camera flies and whirls like the ballet dancers he is recording, and he creates a wonderfully dark spin on The Red Shoes. What I found particularly fascinating watching the film again after many years is how unreliable and imprecise so much of the story is. Told completely from the perspective of Nina – a woman subject to delusions, chronic social insecurity and an increasingly split psyche – it becomes clear that a lot of what we see may not be as clear-cut as we think.

This most obviously affects our perception of Mila Kunis’ rival (or is she?) dancer Lily. How many of the interactions we see are actually happening, and how many are fantasies? With Lily becoming an alternative physical form for Nina’s projection of her own “black swan” persona (several times, Lily’s face morphs and shifts into Nina’s), we have to question virtually every appearance we see of her – and interpret her personality from the prejudiced, fearful view seen by Nina. Similarly, Barbara Hershey’s domineering mother (while undoubtedly controlling) is perhaps not the monster we see. She’s clearly 100% right in her fears for Nina’s sanity. How much of her behaviour is possessive jealousy and how much is it a protective parent who knows her daughter is a danger to herself?

Then of course we have Nina herself. Natalie Portman won every award going for her performance here, a tour de force of bravura dementedness mixed with vulnerability. Nina is a character who we only slowly realise as the film progresses is not the innocent, childlike waif she first appears, but has a much darker, more complex personality. Her “black swan” side – the darker, sexual side of her personality she is encouraged to explore – slowly expresses itself more and more as a physically. Portman clearly demonstrates the differences between the two sides of Nina’s personality. Her increasing desperation, isolation and insecurity are very effective – and the moments where she allows the “black swan” persona to control her actions are riveting.

Aronofsky explores Nina’s unbalanced mind with moments of pure body horror – although it’s grand guignol ickyness like this that probably pushed some people too far. It ties into most of the film being (quite possibly) a series of Nina’s vivid fantasies. Ballet wounds become increasingly magnified – from a broken toe nail early on, to Nina obsessively picking and scratching any wound. In one impossible to watch moment she obsessively picks off a long strip of skin from a finger wound (fortunately revealed immediately after to be fantasy). Beginning to believe she is growing wings, she obsessively scratches her back and has visions of swan flesh morphing over her body. At one point she fantasies her legs breaking into swan legs. In between this are bouts of sexual exploration – both solo and with partners – that seem increasingly unnerving.

Aronofsky’s ballet world is one of meticulous work and back-stabbing brutality. An early sequence covers Nina’s almost ritualistic preparations of her ballet shoes. The troupe, far from supportive, seems to be ripe for bitchy debate and rivalry (although of course some of this may well be Nina’s unhinged perception). Winona Ryder has a neat cameo as a former star dancer, ruthlessly dumped for being too old. Vincent Cassel’s director is at best a domineering bully and at worst a position-abusing horndog, depending on how reliable Nina’s perspective is. It’s the setting of a melodrama, and Aronofsky has expertly mixed a Silence of the Lambs style psycho-drama and The Fly style horror.

Portman holds the film together brilliantly under Aronofsky’s distinctive direction. It’s not going to be for everyone – but Aronofsky understands ballet if nothing else, shoots it brilliantly, and when we finally see Nina fully transformed as the Black Swan dancing the final performance, the energy and controlling focus of her performance, and its beauty, really comes across (even to a ballet ignoramus like me).

Black Swan is such an off-the-wall mix of styles, and so out there in some of its visuals, story developments and characterisations, that it’s not going to please everyone. In fact, catch this on the wrong day and you’ll hate this film (and probably really, really, really hate it). But catch it at the right time and it will stick with you. But whatever your view of its gothic style and content, you’ll admire Portman’s performance, respect the craft with which it has been made, and enjoy several fine performances from Cassel, Hershey and Kunis among others. It’s weird. Very weird. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.