Black swan

One plus factor for the Golden Globes charade is its distinction between "drama" and "comedy/musical" categories. To the delight of directors, producers and lead actors, the distinction means that two sets of talents earn "best" recognitions. A Golden Globe isn't an Oscar but it's certainly the next best thing for actresses such as Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. They both can't win the 2011 female acting Oscar, but they did win the year's two Globes, Portman for psychosexual thriller Black Swan. She should win the year's Best Actress Oscar too.

Director Darren Aronofsky developed the idea of dramatising the Black Swan/White Swan conflict immortalised in Tchaikovsky's ballet music, adapting an original story (The Understudy) by film-maker Andres Heinz, who re-worked his own screenplay for Aronofsky. He'd discussed the project with Natalie Portman for a decade. She clearly sensed that this could be the role of a lifetime, as a psychologically disturbed dancer who was a natural White Swan but lacked the passion to convince her ballet company director that she could also perform the twin role of the Black Swan.

In the ballet, the black swan seduces the lover of the white swan, who commits suicide. It's a romantic melodrama, with appropriately sensuous music and traditional choreography. By the time Aronofsky got the relatively low-budget (US$13 million) movie funded in 2009, by Fox Searchlight, Portman was barely young enough (28) to undergo months of arduous ballet training. She did, and she's convincing to a non-balletomane.

She also had to be convincing as an overly-mothered self-wounding sexually-repressed obsessive dancer for whom professional and personal strains lead to evil hallucinations. In this movie version, the white swan learns to hate her mother, imagine a passionate lesbian adventure with her dancing rival, take drugs, commit murder, grow webbed feet and stab herself in the stomach with a shard of glass. Although lethally wounded, she triumphs at the end of the ballet's first night, dying happily, having achieved "perfection". One minute after the film's end, an audience knows that most of the action never really happened, but Portman makes it all feel credible enough at the time.

Aronofsky makes it look believable too, even when the moments of blood-tainted horror are far-fetched. Naturally, the cinematography (Filipino-American Matthew Libatique working with his favourite director for the fourth time) focuses sharply on shades of black and white, offset by touches of pink. Aptly, too, the excellent musical soundtrack contains variations on Tchaikovsky themes when it isn't playing the real thing in rehearsal and performance scenes from the ballet.

It is an under-stated grand guignol movie which totally depends on Portman for validity. She's on-screen almost all the time, and a small supporting cast really support her, avoiding scenery-chewing exaggerations of their cliched characters: Vincent Cassel (manipulative ballet director), Barbara Hershey (smothering ex-dancer mother), Mila Kunis (rival and ideal black swan) and Winona Ryder (forced-out ballerina and suicide).

Portman, born in Jerusalem, is an Israeli-American. Cassel (the son and husband of other famous actors) is French, Kunis was born in the Ukraine, Hershey and Ryder are American. The three women are Jewish, as is Aronofsky. Raised in a Conservative Jewish home, he may need a supportive ethnic blanket. His award-winning debut feature. Pi, was a Jewish-centric mathematical thriller. The Goldfarbs, mother and son, were central characters in his second movie, Requiem for a Dream, co-starring half-Jewish Jennifer Connelly. Rachel Weisz married him in 2001 (separating in 2010) and she co-starred in his 2005 resurrected third feature, The Fountain, a three-part essay on love and death that bombed badly.

He bounced back in 2008 with The Wrestler, a good grosser (US$45 million) starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, with no visible Jewish angles. Aronofsky has now delivered an even bigger earner, and may no longer need his blanket: his next projects are the Wolverine sequel (working again with Hugh Jackman, his Fountain co-star) and another comic-book action-adventure, Machine Man.