The fascinating feature of this new film "Requiem of Dreams" directed by Aronowski is that it shows the mental state of addicts well. When taking drugs, they seemed to have opened a window temporarily in front of them, and outside the window was the world where everything was normal. Then the window closed unknowingly, and the addicts began to fall. They went around begging for money to buy medicine in order to open the window again. For them, nothing can arouse their interest more than this process.
Aronowski previously directed the same psychedelic "Pi" (1998), which tells the story of a paranoid genius who seems to be about to find an answer, or about God, Either it was about the stock market, or something imagined by the gadgets that tormented him in his head. Now, Aronowski, who has more resources in hand, has given the movie "Requiem of Dreams" a new kind of urgency to the drug movie. With the help of his own camera, he strives to reproduce what these addicts have. How they feel, or how they want to feel, or how they are afraid of feeling.
At the beginning of the movie, a housewife uses an iron chain to tie the TV to the radiator. But it was useless. Her son untied the chain, put the TV on the wheelbarrow, and pushed it along the street to the pawnshop. We guess that the son often does this, and everything in the mother's house may be exchanged for medicine by him. The son's girlfriend and his best friend are also addicts. The mother is too, but addicted to TV and sugar. We almost couldn't recognize the actor who played the mother. Sarah Goldfarb (Alan Burstin) looked fat and sloppy in that loose home outfit. If you have seen her performance in "The Exorcist", then her appearance in this movie will surprise you. His son Harry (Jennifer Leto) described it as haggard and blurred, as did his girlfriend Marianne (Jennifer Connelly). His good friend, the originally weird and funny Tyrone (Marlon Waynes) has also become listless due to drug use. Now, he just wants to try his best to live in a reasonable way. Tyrone suspected he was in trouble, yes, but Harry's trouble was even worse.
Sarah leads a stable retirement. She often lined up with other women of the same age in front of the apartment, lying on a lawn chair basking in the sun. She is also obsessed with a game show in which the host (Christopher MacDonald) will lead the audience to cheer "The winner is born!" Sarah is a kind and innocent woman. Once, she received a rubbish call and was misled by this. She thought she might be a guest of this show. Sarah was worried about not being able to put on her favorite red dress, so she asked for weight loss pills from the doctor.
Sarah did lose weight, and her mind was damaged. "This medicine doesn't do anything anymore," she complained to the pharmacist, and then began to double the dosage. When Sarah complained suspiciously about her vision (she was already beginning to feel the threat posed by the refrigerator at home), the doctor didn't even bother her. At the same time, Harry told Marianne that there was one thing that would allow them to make a lot of money, so that their lives would "get back on track." Tyrone could feel that for Harry, everything was becoming uncontrollable. And Marian, bewitched by Harry, had sex with a psychiatrist (played by Sean Garrett), and finally, she betrayed herself at a male party.
Aronowski is fascinated by how to use cameras to show the way characters see things. At the Virginia Film Festival, I just completed a lens-by-frame analysis of Hitchcock's film "Bird." Hitchcock is the same as Aronofsky: He tells the audience something, but denies other things, so that at first we were still immersed in a certain subjective state, but then we were jerked by the cold reality. Back to an objective state.
Here, Aronofsky uses several close-ups to show the effects of drugs on the protagonists. At first we saw pills or syringes flooding the screen, because addicts were all thinking about these things. Then there are scenes of injecting, swallowing, and taking drugs, because at this time, for them, the entire world is almost non-existent. Then, their pupils began to swell. All these scenes are accompanied by dramatic and exaggerated sound effects.
Aronowski played this series of shots quickly to show how quickly the drugs worked and how disappointingly they lost their effect quickly. Between these two, it is a process of steadily sliding towards despair. Aronovs edited between his mother, the woman who was controlled by the diet pills and trapped at home, and the other three protagonists. At the beginning of the film, the director used a technique that I had never seen before. He used split-screen technology to open the spaces on both sides to each other (Sarah and Harry each took up half of the screen, but they walked into the other half of the screen. On the screen), this well shows that the mother and son are already in the same predicament. Later, in a master-class ending, Aronofsky edited between the four protagonists, who simultaneously fell towards the end of their lives.
Bernstein is not afraid to play Sarah Goldfarb, a woman who is going to collapse. (To show his pity for her, Aronofsky added some fantasy scenes where Sarah appeared on TV. We Found that Burstin is actually so beautiful). Participating in this film is also an adventure for Connery, who is known for her sexy stunner. Perhaps it can be called her biggest adventure since filming. Connery almost starred in "Character of the Thunder" which would have humiliated her before. . "Requiem of Dreams" was inspired by the novel of the same name by Hubert Selby Jr., while Connelly reached in her own way by Jennifer Jason Lee in "Brooklyn Black Street" (1989) The latter is adapted from another novel by Selby. The two films are equally bold but different. In the film, Leto and Waynes embark on a road trip to Florida together. This bridge segment echoes the Florida journey of Jon and Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy", while the former is more bleak than the latter. Leto's needle-pricked and purulent arm seemed to be the subject of his life.
The American Motion Picture Association gave the film a worthless NC-17 rating (not allowed to watch under the age of 17). Artisan Entertainment Company refused, and they asked theaters to implement a policy that only allows adults to watch. I can think of an exception: Children under 17 who are thinking about trying drugs may want to watch this movie because it is like a journey to hell.
Trial translation.
2014/12/09
link to the original text: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/requiem-for-a-dream-2000
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