"First time your name was used, it was beauty, and I knew."
It's an appropriate opening lyric for James Blake's video for "My Willing Heart" (a song co-written with Frank Ocean, taken from last year's The Colour in Anything). The video stars a late-pregnancy Natalie Portman, and was reportedly shot just days before the actress, a fan of Blake, gave birth to a daughter, Amalia.
The high-contrast black-and-white video shows Portman floating in water, laying in bed, touching her belly, undulating with presses and kicks from the unborn underneath her skin. The visual tone, melancholy and ruminative, fits the music's unsettled mood: Its sense of longing fits both Portman's anticipation and Blake's regret.
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