Anyone who manages to make their cinematic debut with an explanation on chaos theory is surely destined to take their career to places where their personal ideology and aesthetic commitment are not at odds with the sharpest intrigue or the captivating appeal of a story well told.
This is how the viewer, navigating around contemporary cinema’s equivalent of The Cape of Good Hope, can occasionally find himself stranded in the horse latitudes, only to suddenly discover the provident island that is the work of Darren Aronofsky, dominating the horizon and demanding to be visited. His still short but brilliant career seems like a tour of the human condition and all the fears that inhabit it. Aronofsky achieves treatises about the risk and fragility of life with the ease of someone who knows they possess a unique discourse.
His films concern us. They demand our attention. How not to stop, how not to stay a little while longer in this strange space which is just a blink away from addiction, in the craziest, most forceful and passionate sense of the word. In his worlds, his characters suffer from exceptional problems and must go through equally exceptional lengths to overcome or be destroyed by them.
It’s the growing harmonies of his waning protagonists that have plotted the course of one the most important filmmakers of the new generation. From his first feature «Pi», the New York director gave us clear signs of the audacity of his screenplays. In this Opera Prima he shows us a theorist obsessed with a number to the point of self-destruction for examining the secrets of nature through mathematics.
His next release «Requiem for a Dream» placed him in the orbit of the big producers. Here, three young adults set to the tone of one of the most recognizable scores in the history of modern filmmaking, are overtaken by the addiction of their dreams and it is the mother of one of the protagonists who appears as the spokesperson of the deepest obsession. Vying against censorship, this film elevated Aronofsky’s status to the prestigious distinction as one of cinema’s elite.
His next films, «The Fountain» and «The Wrestler», seem so far apart, yet both adhere to the same concept: the opportunity to redeem their protagonists guided again by their personal obsession. First, the absolute love of a doctor and his obsessive quest to find a cure for his wife’s cancer, and on the other, the decay of a professional wrestler who faces his worst rival: life itself.
Darren Aronofsky recounts only that which he can tell, traveling on common issues to renew them with his gaze, relying on his tools, using his intuition, turning everything personal, as it should be. His correct proportion of elements is admirable, the precise timing between themes and rhythms, the intention is always substantive and intended to stimulate different sensations, possibly aggressive, rather than a free technique that we’ve seen a thousand times. His latest film «Black Swan», a psychological thriller about a young and insecure ballerina obsessed with perfection, earned several Academy Award nominations consolidating his already recognized work.
Sooner or later we embark upon the universe of Darren Aronofsky for obvious reasons: first for being unmistakable; his images carry an inimitable seal inscribed by someone behind the camera who decides and shapes masterfully; secondly, we need these worlds, these realities that give us vertigo only by peaking into them. It’s the same guilty pleasure of riding a roller coaster, the same half gasp in free fall, the same feeling as being on the edge of something, a chair, a scene, or whatever, but it’s always there, on the edge… at the limit…
We like the cinema of Aronofsky because it is an unstable cinema. A cinema where no fog dissipates, while on the contrary, this cinema leaves doubt-flooded theaters in its wake. Each film is imbued with the suspicion of an apparent pattern of something global, changing and uncertain, from an unpredictable author. It is a film that hurts us irreparably, that violates us, that mercilessly derailed us into unknown spaces: the underworld, the mysticism, the suburban, the mythology. Also, despite everything, it’s a cinema where hope lives feverishly, the weight of existence, a heroism unrepentant, all connected with the spectator, rushed to be devoured by the obsession.
There’s no room for vagueness here. In his films we enter live and direct. We connect again with what he wants to tell us. We are thankfully led astray on the journey that is this stupendous filmography that veers from the visceral to the subtle, from the raw to the out-of-body. And everything is as it should be: demanding, committed, brutal.
Darren Aronofsky casts an image of a curious, tireless explorer who searches the deepest abysses, giving new twists to studied themes. And in the process he takes us by the hand through all this darkness, as we obediently continue to be complete addicts of his films.
