Requiem For A Dream

And we come across another film that can't be measured on the good movie/ bad movie scale. Aronofsky, who we like, adapts the Hubert Selby Jnr, who we also like's, novel. In many ways this is not like a conventional film. It is short- just 90 minutes, and the speed in which the narrative moves often made us feel as though we were watching a play.
It is though, the most visual, screeny, if that's a word, type of movie imaginable. Stepping around the pitfall of precocious self conciousness, it uses devices of montage, repitition, and any number of cinematographic tricks to put across the altered states and states of minds of our characters. This is done succesfully, and really the hallucinatory cuts make up the content of the movie far more than a plot does; decentering the audience. It is not an easy experience to view, due to this 'different' nature, but when one engages it is powerful and exciting.
The performances are suitably believable, the earlier comparitively iddylic scenes nicely posed as not glorification, but of understanding. The relations of smack to amphetamines and the TV culture occasionally does verge on the heavy handed. All the same the messages put across are worth repeating, and we should remember that at the time of the film's release (2000) were maybe not so much a staple of the alternative culture.
So, this is a fine piece of work, we look greatly forward to actually seeing (rather than reading sexy interviews) more of Aronofsky's work. He is clearly an innovative director, not afraid to mangle the traditional structures and contents of your well-made movie. These combine to make Requiem feel oddly compelling rather than a straight up classic, but this is hardly a criticism. Righteously good.