SO YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT PROBLEMS... (Requiem for a Dream (DVD))

Name: sjen5en

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Product:	Requiem for a Dream (DVD)
Date:	18/10/01 (41 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Special effects, Film techniques

Disadvantages: Intense, Brutal

Following on from his last feature Pi, Darren Aronofsky returns with a film even more daring and visionary. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr, the film centres on four characters from Coney Island and explores the declines into their various addictions.

Widow Sara (Ellen Burstyn) is the lonely over-weight mother who, when she is given a chance to appear on her favourite television show, embarks on a quest to lose weight and fit into her special red dress. Meanwhile her son Harry (Jared Leto) comes up with a get rich quick scheme for his best mate, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly).

As you might expect, things turn gradually worse – marked by the title cards ‘Summer’, ‘Fall’, and ‘Winter’. While having trouble losing weight by dietary means, the mother is prescribed slimming pills by her doctor and finds herself desperately addicted to them. The others fair no better and, after various mix-ups and mistakes, gradually become addicted to the smack they are trying to sell. While Harry and Tyrone go to more extreme measure to make back the money they’ve lost, Marion finds herself falling into a very seedy way of life….

Where Pi may have put the mainstream audience off with its headache inducing mathematical plot, it’s grainy black and white, unique aesthetics, and use of strap-on cameras, Requiem For A Dream will hardly win them over. In the purist, most simple way of saying it: this film is hell. But it’s definitely not a bad film, but in the last 20 or so minutes it is sometimes brutal and hard to stomach as imagery and sounds integrate and overlap, creating a malaise of events

The independent success of Pi has allowed Aronofsky to up the budget, which results in a more polished production, with amazing special effects and camera techniques (like the 30 second tracking shot of Ellen getting hyper), split screens, jump-cuts, and s
ubliminal images.

The orchestral score is amazing also and makes up for the industrial Clint Mansell score that, like in Pi, is more than just a little bit annoying and clangy. The all-too-functional dialogue also grates in places, but you can forgive it for its short-comings because it truly is a brave, uncompromising ride.

Requiem For A Dream is truly a film makers paradise – a catalogue of techniques and styles to lick the lips over, and there is also meaningful messages underlying thrown in to keep us moralists happy. But instead of the usual ‘drugs = bad’ parent pleasing preaching, this shows you a different side of the coin – that not all addictions are drug/crime related, and can affect the normal, everyday person.

Sad in places. Gross in places. Sick in places. Pretty heavy going all in all, but definitely worth an attempt at watching it. True intelligent, auteurist filmmaking at its most shocking.

Summary: