Darren Aronofsky
Requiem for a Dream

"Requiem For A Dream", the funeral of a dream, the American dream, never before so bitterly and violently brought to its conclusions.

The film, the second by the talented director Darren Aronofsky, intertwines the lives of four characters, each "addicted", dependent on something. The elderly widow Sara Goldfarb (E. Burstyn), a TV-obsessed maniac of a fake show like so many others, one day receives a call from the manager of this show, offering her the chance to participate as an audience member. Over the moon with the news, she decides to force herself on a strict diet just to be able to wear again that red dress that suited her so well in her youth. Turning to a ruthless dietician, she will end up going crazy, prey to her own hallucinations and nightmares due to amphetamines prescribed to curb her appetite. Her dream, her show, will turn into a macabre nightmare of a psychiatric hospital.

Harry Goldfarb (J. Letho), Sara's son, lives a life of outcast and loser with his girlfriend Maryon (J. Connelly) and friend Tyrone (D. Keith), always searching for heroin to make everyday reality less bitter. One day, by pure chance, they get their hands on a larger dose than expected, gaining connections that allow them to become rich and build their own small empire. Thanks to money (and the drugs consumed massively) their conditions seem to improve, and even Maryon appears to be able to open the clothing atelier she had always dreamed of. However, disintegration comes also for this dream. The drugs run out, friends fight, love is put to the test by dependence (on money and heroin), and the struggles to get a new dose lead to a terrible and irreversible finale, shocking in its violence.

The work is a real hammer blow to the glass universe of the American dream: it highlights all contradictions, invisible cracks and shows how thin the line between success and annihilation really is. Superb editing, with many scenes edited with a split-screen (a brutal comparison of the characters' addictions) and generally an almost music video-like structure, especially in the finale, where twenty convulsive minutes are condensed with very few words but only music, sounds, and alternating frames.

Far from "Trainspotting", with which it perhaps only shares the theme of drugs, the film delves even deeper into the human soul, revealing what any of us, deep down, would be capable of doing to obtain even a shred of the most ardent dream we have always set out to achieve. Unmissable.