Requiem For A Dream Ass

Requiem For A Dream Ass

© 2022 Static Media ® . All Rights Reserved

The Requiem For A Dream Scene That Went Too Far

NEWS
EXCLUSIVES
MOVIES
TV
REVIEWS
FEATURES

The Requiem For A Dream Scene That Went Too Far

By Leo Noboru Lima / Feb. 20, 2022 9:50 am EDT
Darren Aronofsky is a director who has built an entire career out of laying it on as thick as possible. In each of his seven feature films, the American filmmaker has managed to keep coming up with ways to pummel new depths of angst, paranoia, formal intensity, and psychological affliction. But no other Aronofsky film goes quite as dark, quite as relentlessly, as "Requiem for a Dream."
The dorm-room-classic 2000 indie drama, which utilizes two parallel drug addiction stories as bedrocks for a sprawling reflection on human wants and needs, became the stuff of legend for the sheer nightmarish fervor of some of its scenes. As Harry (Jared Leto), Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), Marion ( Jennifer Connelly ), and Sara (Ellen Burstyn) get consumed whole and have their entire sense of reality eroded by substance dependence, they find themselves in situations too despairing and stomach-churning to even describe, culminating in a four-way climatic montage that overlays severe withdrawal symptoms, physical abuse, gangrene, sexual humiliation, forced labor, electroconvulsive therapy, flop sweat, amputation, catatonia, and household untidiness.
For the most part, it's all par for the course — Aronofsky intends to shock and rattle, and that's just what he accomplishes. But there's one particular tactic he utilizes to ramp up intensity that comes off as just cheap, if not outright insensitive.
At the end of "Requiem for a Dream," all four protagonists are, essentially, in hell. Aronofsky designs the movie in such a way as to build to the darkest possible moment in each character's life, interweaving those moments frantically to achieve an indelible horror movie payoff. Sara is submitted to forced ECT and becomes numb. Marion is degraded by a den of sexual sociopaths. Harry and Tyrone are arrested and find themselves all alone in the world.
For Harry, the nightmare is compounded by the amputation of his gangrenous left arm. For Tyrone, meanwhile, hell is a lot less over-the-top. Facing withdrawal while being put through the grind of prison life is a depressing enough fate, but, to rise Tyrone's denouement to the surrounding level of hysteric horror, Aronofsky also has him be verbally and physically berated by racist prison guards, who call him a "dope fiend n*****" in between punches, and force him to "learn some manners."
While it is true that U.S. prisons are known for being horrifying, flagrantly racist environments , that sequence sticks out like a sore thumb. Most of "Requiem" wisely avoids realism and goes instead for emotional acuity. Sara's and Marion's scenes are not offensive, because their horror is nearly expressionistic. But in a film with little room for social commentary, the racism Tyrone experiences is ultimately reduced to another stop in the shock value train. It's a callous treatment for a subject that demands to be handled responsibly.

If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device.
Videos you watch may be added to the TV's watch history and influence TV recommendations. To avoid this, cancel and sign in to YouTube on your computer.
An error occurred while retrieving sharing information. Please try again later.
0:03 / 2:33 • Watch full video Live

Requiem for a Dream at 20: Aronofsky's nightmare still haunts
Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream. Photograph: Allstar/Artisan Entertainment/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
Almost Famous at 20: Cameron Crowe's warm-hearted ode to music journalism
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
© 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)
The auteur’s bold and brutal 2000 adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s cultish novel about addiction remains an indelible and shocking act of provocation
I was 17, and just beginning university, when Requiem for a Dream descended on cinemas like an opaque, bruise-blue mist. Notwithstanding the no-under-18s restrictions stamped upon it by stern censors in the UK and elsewhere, I like to think I was the optimal age for it. Darren Aronofsky’s addiction drama may be cross-generational in its focus, but with its unremittingly punishing storytelling and frenzied, all-systems-go cinematic energy, it represents a very young person’s idea of how a very adult film looks, sounds and spasms. I loved it, even as it followed me through a tertiary arts education to the point of overkill: its poster gracing umpteen friends’ dorm rooms, its Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet string theme – and its countless remixes – soundtracking all manner of student theatre pieces and presentations, its formal and literary flourishes seized upon by many a hip professor seeking a modish mutual reference point.
If this sounds like the prelude to a revisionist takedown, I thought it might be one too. It’s 20 years since Requiem for a Dream was released, and at least 15 since I last saw it: revisiting it this week, I was prepared for it to be as dated and artificially edgy as a turn-of-the-millennium tribal tattoo. In a sense it is. There’s no mistaking Aronofsky’s film as a highly styled product of its era, its hopped-up editing schemes and plethora of lens choices and gimmicks a glossy refinement of 90s indie aesthetics and Tarantino-patented extremity. It doesn’t miss a trick, and doesn’t want us to miss any of its tricks either. Some critics called it over-directed at the time, and more of their colleagues would probably join them today; a generation of more restrained kids as old as I was then, quieter rather than shock-inclined in their anxiety, might even agree.
And yet. Certainly, a large part of Requiem’s stylistic mania amounts to auteurist showing-off. It was Aronofsky’s second film, coming two years after his scrappier, more cryptic but equally out-to-dazzle Sundance sensation Pi, and with more money and bigger names at his disposal, he set out to prove himself as the pre-eminent artist-provocateur of his indie class. Still, in choosing to adapt Hubert Selby Jr’s cultish 1978 novel of New York junkie miserablism – and very faithfully, at that – the then 31-year-old film-maker found about the ideal canvas for his ugly showmanship.
The novel was grimly forensic in detailing the physical and mental destruction wrought by drug addiction on a quartet of characters: three of them connected in their youth and knowing submission to heroin, and the fourth an elderly Brooklyn widow, drawn obliviously into amphetamine psychosis by solitude, TV fixation and irresponsibly prescribed diet pills. It’s a slender story that makes its essential points early, often and obviously: we’re all vulnerable to some manner of addiction, and legal ones aren’t necessarily safer or less ruinous than their underworld counterparts.
Scripted in collaboration with the author, Aronofsky’s interpretation doesn’t complicate things any, but it does bring to the material an electrified sensory charge that hasn’t quite been replicated in any other addiction drama. In all its flash, slam-bang technique, it vividly evokes the sensation of what drugs actually do to your system, briefly for better and mostly for worse, from twitchy initial rush through to comedown and tortured aftermath.
Aronofsky’s film-making is neither subtle nor tasteful, two words you wouldn’t tend to apply to heroin addiction either. Its excesses feel grounded, however oppressively, in the hellish experience of all its characters – it’s surely the most stylishly made drug drama ever to escape any accusations of glamorising the scene. As two young, beautiful, kohl-eyed lovers bound by needles and deferred dreams, Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly initially seem veritable poster children for that quintessentially 90s concept of heroin chic. By the time the film reaches its notoriously grotesque, despairing climactic montage, crosscutting between the amputation of his gangrenous arm – a body-horror image more unforgettably gross than any cursed cigarette-pack photo – and her going ass-to-ass with another woman for a braying, paying audience, any concept of “chic” is firmly off the table.
Such is the paradox of Requiem for a Dream, which pushed the envelope in its explicit, from-the-inside view of addiction and its spiralling consequences, while maintaining a philosophical perspective as cautiously moralising as any Just Say No public service announcement. What real shock value it had was tied mostly to Ellen Burstyn’s indelible, progressively unhinged performance as frail, sweet-natured shut-in Sara Goldfarb, whose short-term chemical solution to her loneliness and body-image issues winds up frying her brain as drastically as any class-A drug. Burstyn’s fearless turn hooked this impressively abrasive film an Oscar nomination it would never have received in any other category – and with it, an older audience that probably wouldn’t have considered seeing a film about three young, damned smackheads. It probably surprised them as much as it did any student-age punters drawn in by the vogueish, subversion-promising marketing: “the cinematic heroin nightmare for the whole family” wasn’t anywhere to be seen on that ubiquitous poster, but it wouldn’t have been far off.
Two decades on, Requiem for a Dream doesn’t look especially cool – but then, it never really did. Rather, its numbing, slightly-sick-in-your-mouth power remains undiminished, as does the hard-driving impact of Aronofsky’s film-making: it set the pace for a filmography marked by earnest, grandiose outrageousness, from the ludicrous, ravishing romantic folly of The Fountain through to the magnificent, unapologetically narcissistic artist’s self-diagnosis of his recent Mother!. As someone born closer to the year 2000 than I was might say, Requiem for a Dream didn’t have to go so hard. But I’m kind of glad it did.

If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device.
Videos you watch may be added to the TV's watch history and influence TV recommendations. To avoid this, cancel and sign in to YouTube on your computer.
An error occurred while retrieving sharing information. Please try again later.
0:43 / 1:45 • Watch full video Live

the uncut scene from requem for a dream

the uncut Scene from Requiem for a Dream

13,718 views Dec 5, 2009 the uncut scene from requem for a dream … ...more

Hamster Oorn
Alana Evans Interracial
Big Tits Amateurs

Requiem For A Dream Ass

Report Page