Aronofsky’s ‘Requiem for a Dream’ Isn’t Overrated (Opinion)

Do you want to read naTemat.pl without ads and customize the portal? Create your “naTemat” account.

Where did the “Dream Requiem” phenomenon come from?

It was 1999 when Darren Aronofsky And his friend Eric Watson They spent a thousand dollars on the movie rights. “Requiem for a Dream” Hubert Selby Jr. You can guess it was a steep price to pay for guys fresh out of film school with only one feature film under their belt. A leap into the deep end that, in the mind of an idealistic young man, simply had to work.

Selby was Aronofsky’s childhood idol. BrooklynThat’s why adapting his book had such a personal dimension for the director. As a film novice, making his debut at the Sundance Film Festival, he didn’t quite know what he was allowed to do in the cinema and what he wasn’t. Yes, he had a college degree, but he hadn’t yet sold his artistic soul to mainstream cinema.

It was released on a budget of around $4 million. A movie you watch once and say to yourself, “It will never happen again.” (In the good sense of the word.) Requiem for a Dream wasn’t a commercial success (it grossed $7.4 million worldwide), but it made Selby cry and is still talked about 24 years after its premiere. Why? Because it defined independent cinema in the first decade of this century, and its genius still haunts young filmmakers.

“For me, the promise of independence is the ability to experiment,” Aronofsky later said in an interview with IndieWire. Well, there’s no denying that he was able to experiment a lot when he was young.

“Requiem for a Dream” is primarily a film about people.

Requiem for a Dream takes viewers to the Brighton Beach neighborhood bordered by the Ferris wheel and Coney Island roller coasters. Here we meet the four protagonists: the widow, Sarah Goldfarbwho watches TV tournaments all afternoon, and is addicted to them Heroin son Harry Ego.boy with his girlfriend Marion And a friend Tyronewho also love to “drip” and draw lines, are planning to open a clothing store. They have big dreams, but an even bigger hunger.

Addiction affects everyone, even the lost widow who desperately wants to wear a red dress years ago to appear on her beloved game show, reaches for diet pills that are actually appetite-suppressing amphetamines.

At first glance, Requiem for a Dream seems like the most obvious example of a film in the series. “Kids, don’t do drugs.”The heroes end up back where they started, their minds as corrupted as their bodies. This is, of course, an oversimplification.

Aronofsky himself has emphasized several times that Selby Jr.’s prose adaptation is more about loneliness, looking for a quick way to fill the void in life and the inner demons that attract more nightmares. The script does not glorify drug use, but it does humanize drug addicts.

It was important to show these characters as people with lives and creative accomplishments. Marion – her loft was filled with dreams of working in fashion. Tyrone was a DJ, so we installed DJ equipment in his apartment. From the beginning, it was a story about people and how easily they can go astray. The responsibility of the set design was to show the optimism and potential these characters had in the face of the darkness that was following them.Darren AronofskyIn an interview with “Al-Nisr”

Visual Mastery. A picture says more than a thousand words.

However, it’s not about the plot in “Requiem for a Dream” but about the way Aronofsky decided to adapt the story written by Selby Jr. to the screen. There’s no compromise, but there’s also no eye candy. body horrorThis low budget forced the director to use innovative tricks using only what he had at hand.

What is the best way to express the euphoria and euphoria of drugs? For routine and dream sequences, the director used quick cuts, also called fast cuts. hip hop montageA twisted banknote, a snapped pill bottle, a sudden close-up of a microscope slide, then a shot of a dilated pupil. Everything is everywhere at once, sometimes micro-screen, sometimes macro, sometimes split-screen.

Watching “Requiem for a Dream,” you can see that Aronofsky made sticking to principle a point of honor. “Show, don’t tell”Many productions (both old and contemporary) largely discuss the issue rather than show it. The director of “Black Swan” used filming techniques that favor sensory processing to express the essence of the film in images (not words).

In the introduction, the attentive viewer will notice that the scenes last longer than any other film (from 90 seconds to two minutes). In the end, he will be so excited by the multi-second shots, the parallel editing (which involves interweaving two stories running at the same time) and the fish-eye lens that he will feel as if he has just had a bad trip.

The average 100-minute film has a minimum of 600 shots and a maximum of 700 shots, while “Requiem for a Dream” has up to 2,000 shots. Such a large number more or less symbolizes How quickly addiction occurs in human consumption.

In contrast to the fast, sharp sequences, there are wide, empty frames, as miserable as the characters when they need a kick. All this is accompanied by an amazing soundtrack. Clinta MansillaWhich transforms from 90s hip-hop beats to an elegy song. “Eternal Light” Similar to the sad compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Moreover, the color palette in “Requiem for a Dream” is limited. Gray remains gray even on the high stage. Stage designer James Chinlund He came up with the idea of ​​removing the color red from the entire film (except for the dress Sarah was obsessed with), which not only helped the creators unify the composition, but also reinforced the drug-related message well.

– I was never interested in heroin. In itself. I tried not to mention the drugs the characters were taking because I felt that Selby’s broader message wasn’t about a specific substance—it was actually about addiction, and addiction can take any form. There’s just one sharp shot of a needle being inserted into the arm. “I knew that by interrupting the hip-hop montage for the first time, I was sharing my position with people[on drugs],” Aronofsky said.

Heartbreaking performance by Ellen Burstyn

Only one Oscar nomination – not for Jared Leto (“American Psycho”), nor for Jennifer Connelly (“The Maze”) or Marlona’s phone (“Scary Movie”). Hollywood veteran Ellen Burstynwhich the audience had previously seen in the cult movie “Exorcist”She almost turned down the role of Sarah because of the film’s unnatural themes. She only changed her mind after the screening. ByeAronofsky’s feature-length debut.

Two decades after filming Requiem for a Dream, the five-time Golden Globe-nominated actress admits that playing the Coney Island widow is high on her list of accomplishments — if not at the top — she said in an interview with Vulture.

Sarah is the one who gets the most sympathy from the audience.. From a naive old woman who lost her husband and doesn’t even realize that she’s slowly losing her son, she turns into a crazy old woman who doesn’t know what’s really happening to her until the very end. To say that it ends the worst of the three is to say nothing.

Burstein uses every minute to delight us with her vision of Sarah. And to tear our hearts into little pieces.

Experiences of independent youth

Darren Aronofsky’s experiments on the set of “Requiem for a Dream” prove that a film doesn’t have to have seven or eight zeros to be memorable. From a broader perspective, the box office failure did not hurt the then-newbie director’s career..

The author of “Black Swan” and “The Whale” may not have made a distinct anti-drug statement in terms of his text, but he showed it. Sometimes it is useful to replace a frame from the “talking heads” series with something more serious..

Young independent filmmakers continue to draw inspiration from Aronofsky, and their low-budget productions are now under the banner of semi-mainstream film studios like A24.

Read also: https://natemat.pl/557498,zmierzch-i-rasizm-ludzie-wierzyli-ze-rodzini-ujemynie-sa-wilkolakami