Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Requiem for a Dream is an American drama film which was directed by Darren Aronofsky and based from a novel with the same name by Hubert Selby, Jr. The story, the film, follows four characters through their world of addiction, delusion, imprisonment, desperation and subsequently the harsh reality that follows as they battle a drug addiction in one form or another.

Darren Aronofsky uses a montage of quick fire shots throughout (often termed a hip hop montage). Apparently while a normal 100 minute film has 600 to 700 cuts, this film has more than 2,000. As it says on Wikipedia:

"Split-screen is used extensively, along with extremely tight closeups. Long tracking shots (including those shot with an apparatus strapping a camera to an actor, called the Snorricam) and time-lapse photography are also prominent stylistic devices.

In order to portray the shift from the objective, community-based narrative to the subjective, isolated state of the characters' perspectives, Aronofsky alternates between extreme closeups and extreme distance from the action and intercuts reality with a character's fantasy. Aronofsky aims to subjectivize emotion, and the effect of his stylistic choices is personalization rather than alienation.

The film's distancing itself from empathy is furthered structurally by the use of intertitles (Summer, Fall, Winter), marking the temporal progress of addiction. The average scene length shortens as the film progresses (beginning around 90 seconds to two minutes) until the movie's climactic scenes, which are cut together very rapidly (many changes per second) and are accompanied by a score which increases in intensity accordingly. After the climax, there is a short period of serenity, during which idyllic dreams of what may have been are juxtaposed with portraits of the four shattered lives."

My opinion on the 'art' direction for this film is this: The quick, successions of images and the repetitive showing of scenes made it all very disorienting and naustating. I do not know if this was the goal of the film, to draw the audience into a sickening, spinning world that the characters live in, but I did not enjoy it. I came away with a headache and a large need to never see the film again. I thought the art direction for the film could have been a lot better to show the character's unfurling lives without making the viewer sick and irritated.

The sound quality, something I was told to take into consideration more than anything else, was deafening and added to the sickening feeling of the film. The booming, cacophony of sound and repetitive soundtrack was ghastly and made everything very claustrophobic. The soundtrack I found annoying and did not relate in any way shape or form with what was going on in the film, it clashed terribly with scenes that should have been sad, terrifying or dramatic.

The sound effects were, again, extremely loud. The creative way they mixed certain sounds for certain actions was interesting and awe-inspiring, although some sounds were stomachturning. For example, there is a scene where one of the characters, an elderly mother Sara Goldfarb (played by Ellen Burstyn), is taking pills, the passage of time between each pill being a few seconds where a close-up shot of the pill going into her mouth was shown a multiple of times and the sound linked with those many shots was very off-putting.