Release date: October 17th, 2011
Certificate (UK): 18
Running time: 97 minutes
Year of production: 2000
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Darren Aronofsky (screenplay), Hubert Selby Jnr (novel)
Composer: Clint Mansell
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connolly, Marlon Wayans
Who knows when exactly, but there’ll come a time when those who are left start to look back on the films that survived the inevitable collapse we’re heading blindly toward.
They’ll want to see how our present culture suffered as long as it did. I hope at least one of Darren Aronofsky’s films make it to that moment, especially this one; an anti-capitalist tale illustrating our pre-occupation with the illusion that better living can be attained through increased consumption.
As a writer and director there doesn’t seem to be anyone today I can compare his work to. That they speak so specifically and emotionally about the human condition seems wholly exclusive to him.
Requiem For A Dream, his second feature that followed the equally and yet uniquely impressive Pi (1998), was the film that first brought him to my attention. Set in Coney Island, New York and based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jnr, it’s a nightmarish journey into the lives of four people; Harry (Jared Leto), his mother Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The film tells of their spiralling addictions as they all try to reach an increasingly unattainable reality. The American Dream.
Sara becomes addicted to weight-loss amphetamine pills and sedatives as she grows anxiousness about appearing on a television game show. Harry and Tyrone sell drugs in the hope of making enough money to open a store to sell clothes that Marion designs but it gets out of control landing one in prison and the other in hospital. Meanwhile Marion gets drawn into performing in sex shows to fund her escalating addiction.
With its mix of close-ups and time-lapse photography, Requiem also employs the use of fast cutting (sometimes referred to hip-hop montage) to hone in on a style that fits the narrative structure of the film perfectly. The camera stays on the characters long enough to allow us to care for them deeply and to be affected by what’s unfolding around them, but it also moves quickly to let us experience their loss of control and anguish too.
In Postmodern Hollywood, M. Keith Booker, a PhD professor at University of Florida, points out a very interesting contrast between Requiem and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and the film’s connection to mainstream capitalist behaviour:
“Whereas Natural Born Killers connects the media and violence, Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) connects the media with drug culture. Stone’s film suggests no contradiction between bourgeois values and mass murder, while Aronofsky’s (based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr.) sees drug use as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, mainstream capitalist behavior. Aronofsky’s film also exemplifies the MTV editing style disparaged by Altman’s Stuckel, while, as the title indicates, it uses both the psychic fragmentation of characters and the formal fragmentation of the editing style to comment on the loss of utopian energy in postmodern America.”
Booker then goes on to point out exactly why the characters in the film fail in their attempts to make their dreams reality:
Later on he also notes that viewers of this film tend to see it, and describe it, as a ‘drug movie’ although it’s not:
There’s no doubt in my mind that Requiem presents a valuable vantage point to view our current culture, not just in terms of its reliance on drugs but on a bigger scale; its reliance on the illusion that we can attain better living through increased consumption. Our present economic crises and current global conflicts are nothing more than a direct result of this.
Like all of Aronofsky’s films, Requiem is a challenging experience, but an inescapable one for anyone wishing to experience the work of a visionary in his attempt to meld art and culture into one thoughtful piece of work.
The founder of Static Mass Emporium and one of its Editors in Chief is a composer and music producer with a philosophy degree. Static Mass is where he lives his passion for film and writing about it. A fan of film classics, documentaries and World Cinema, Patrick prefers films with an impeccable way of storytelling that reflect on the human condition.
You can find his music on Soundcloud .
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