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Restate my assumptions: few great filmmakers make a success of it from the start. There are notable examples like Scorsese, Lynch and
Tarantino but for most, it's work in progress. So when someone
like Darren Aronofsky comes around, it's time to get excited.
Aronofsky burst onto the indie scene at the Sundance
Festival last year, with his first feature, Pi, which scooped him
the prestigious Best Director Award. It is the story of Max, a maths graduate working on the
riddle of said mathematics Holy Grail that he believes unlocks
the secrets to the universe itself and the numbers that govern
it. A shady Wall Street group and an Hassidic sect crave
the same solution for their own ends and as Max nears his goal,
their obsession with him intoxicates toward a psychotic showdown
between Max, his investors, the Torah and sanity itself.
The film explores Max's introspected paranoia through an
abstracted mix of audio and visual meltdown played off against
the surreal background of New York subways, Max's computer-junky
apartment, Chinatown and it's strange inhabitants. The film
succeeds in a steady equilibrium of visual and intellectual
overload. A heady cocktail of mathematics and urban paranoia
from Max's haunting voiceover to the fast paced cinematography of
each scene leave the spectator transfixed in awe.
The grainy monochromatic visuals and electro-insane
soundtrack of owe much to Eraserhead but work hard to surpass
the comparison. From here the film delivers the usual staple of
cliches we come to expect from anx-ridden, first-time directors -
childhood, entrapment, masochism - but these appear
justified necessity rather an aesthetic or generic demands.
Aronofsky carefully weaves a delicate balance of filmic
language that most scholars and veterans find perplexing. This is
modern filmmaking feeding off it's own culture: merging visual
sublimity and intellectual expectation with self-reference worked
into the anorexic perfection of low-budget originality.
Pi also marks a return for Clint Mansell, credited
with the film's original score and responsible for the audio end
of the film's attention-grabbing opening and closing sequences.
With a bandy mixture of electrostatic to accompany Max's journey
into madness including the ganglionic delights of Orbital,
Autechre, Aphex Twin and the crazed stupor of Mansell's techno
theme the film takes one step closer to a heavenly perfection.
As for the cast and in particular Sean Gullette's tour de
force portrayal of Max, it is this flourishing insanity that
embellishs a reality we are invited to believe and partake in
and when the film ends, leaves us questioning our own sanity and
that of the world we live in.
Restate my assumptions: Darren Aronofsky has a bright
future.
RATING: (c)Limer 1998
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Pi (1997)
