Birthday of the Requiem for a Dream
On May 14, 2000, at the Cannes International Film Festival, the premiere of Darren Aronofsky's film "Requiem for a Dream" was held as part of an out-of-competition screening.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by Hubert Selby Jr., published in 1978. In 1947, 19-year-old Hubert Selby, working as a docker in the port, was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. Antibiotics had not been available. The treatment Selby received was very cruel. In particular, to get to his lungs, doctors removed 11 ribs for him. And then one lung was completely removed and partly another.
After treatment, Selby received a number of serious complications, accompanied by severe pain. The use of painkillers, in particular morphine, and then heroin, led to a strong drug dependence of the future writer. For several years, Selby struggled with this addiction and eventually won. Selby very carefully and reliably described his feelings experienced during the years of drug addiction in his book. Equally authentic and realistic are the feelings of drug addicts depicted in the film. It is so reliable that this quite realistic film received a nomination for the American Saturn Award in the category of Best Horror Movie.
Before the filming began, director Darren Aronofsky urged male lead actors Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans to exclude sexual contact and sugar intake from their lives for 30 days to understand how irresistible desire people behave.
The film received 35 film awards, but all these awards were received at not the most prestigious film forums of the Western Hemisphere. At festivals in Europe and Asia, the film was not even nominated.
The American Film Academy offered Ellen Burstyn a nomination in the category Best Supporting Actress, and the producers of the film guaranteed her victory in this nomination. But the actress, who in 1975 already won an Oscar for Best Actress in Martin Scorsese’s film “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore” found the offer humiliating and agreed only to be nominated for Best Actress. But this time she lost this nomination to Julia Roberts. A similar story took place with the Golden Globe Award. The film did not receive other nominations for Oscars and Golden Globes.
The film received quite controversial reviews from American film critics. According to the Rotten Tomatoes website, the share of positive ratings was 79%. Roger Ebert rated the film with three and a half stars out of four possible. At the same time, in his review, Ebert criticized the decision of the American Film Association: "The movie was given the worthless NC-17 rating by the MPAA; rejecting it, Artisan Entertainment is asking theaters to enforce an adults-only policy. I can think of an exception: Anyone under 17 who is thinking of experimenting with drugs might want to see this movie, which plays like a travelogue of hell."
This idea, to a certain extent, was continued by Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov, noting in his review that “the film will surely occupy its niche in the history of cinema, remembering as perhaps the most merciless and hopeless artistic illustration of problems that are somehow tied to drugs against the background of which the former, also far from life-affirming works ... pretty fade."
Another Russian film critic, Viktor Matizen, spoke much more sharply about the film and to some extent explained why the film did not get the attention of European film festivals: “There is no dispute, Darik Aronson (the simplified translation of the pompous "Darren Aronofsky") is a talented guy, but his new film is one hundred percent creepy vibe, where the material selected by the director is so gloomy that it cannot be enlightened by any art form. It’s true that people dream in reality and stupefy themselves from inner emptiness, but it had not sense making movies for the sake of this trivial truth. In addition, it is unclear where to find so many masochists to recoup this depressing story about the harmful effects of dreams and heroin on the human body. "
However, the financial forecaster from Matizen turned out to be so-so. Despite the strict age index “R” assigned to the film, which significantly limited its box office, the film grossed $ 7.3 million worldwide. And, thus, fully recouped the budget of 4.5 million dollars.
More than 75% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave the film "Requiem for a Dream" ratings from 8 to 10. And 25% of viewers - users of IMDB and Kinopoisk - rated the film a top score of 10.
Based on the foregoing, the rating of the film "Requiem for a Dream" according to the version of FilmGourmand was 8.166, due to which the film took 504th place in the Golden Thousand.
