Warm nights with Black Swan

Black Swan. The movie, with Natalie Portman, who outdoes herself playing a severely psychologically screwy ballerina. It’s not my kind of movie normally, it being termed a ‘psychosexual thriller’ or some such movie jargon, but I’m being wild (rowr) and branching out. I did need to close my eyes in certain parts because, well, I’m a sissy. I’m glad I went to watch it, though. Firstly because of the unrelenting heat we’re having and the contradictory morgue-like temperature of the cinema and secondly because watching acting talent like Natalie Portman’s is a treat.

The first reason – the coolth bit- was reinforced by the fact that it was shown in the old cinema here in The City Beneath the Mountain. I love it there. They show art movies and the cinema is huge and airy and has uncomfortable old seats and the sound isn’t brilliant but you can buy a cold beer and drink it in the movie and the (bad) sound isn’t all muffled and airless like the new (and amazing too) wall-to-wall-to-ceiling carpeted surround-sound new types.

The experience was further improved by the daughter of the lady working there (aged 3) spending a very long time pushing all the seats down, row-by-row, before the movie started. We helped her find her (very pink) shoes that she’d shed with wild abandon when her mother came to fetch her before the definitely not suitable for 3-year olds movie started.

And then Wild Swan, a grittily filmed, bone-chilling (or maybe that was the air con?) account of the search for perfection of a ballerina, motivated by her mother’s failings as one, and resulting in horror of the highest degree. It wriggled down into me and made me think. A stick-thin, sinewed Natalie Portman portrayed her with a brilliance that shone. It left me feeling a little raw.

Then a plate of pasta and a glass of wine at a restaurant outside. The warm Summer night defrosted us from our cinema-induced chill and I wished on the first star way up there next to the fattening moon.