mother (w&d aronofsky)

Aronofsky lets his hair down.

No doubt about it. This is the equivalent of a director rocking out with the longest extended drum solo he can get away with. Well actually, two drum solos, because the film is essentially two hyper-ventilating sequences which belong to no real genre apart from a the excess genre (which doesn’t exist). cf Ken Russell, the closing sequence of Zabriskie Point, Zulawski etc.

Aronofsky goes eco-conscious.

Because, yes, this is an allegory about mother nature and the way that mankind had raped and pillaged the earth in the quest to make his beautiful music. 

Aronofsky goes Sarah Kane.

Well, to be fair, he’s not the only one. It’s just that having recently worked on Blasted, you pick up the way in which violence and shock-value are used, artfully, to provoke a reaction, and that’s exactly what Mother is doing too. It wants you to walk out. It wants you to say, Ya basta, as many of the good citizens of Montevideo did indeed do on Saturday night.

Aronofsky reveals unexpected sense of humour.

Which is connected to this point; you can almost hear the cackling glee of the director behind the camera as he unleashes his next affront on the viewer. Take that, he says, with a big grin, and he’s right, because Mother is hilarious. 

Aronofsky has fun at the studio’s expense.

What a joy it must have been to sit on the first preview screenings. You’ve got Lawrence and Bardem and Harris and Pfeiffer this is what you’re doing with them?

Aronofsky the provocateur (again)

Mother might be his closest film to Requiem for a Dream; only this is a project which lacks the po-faced quality of the earlier film. Requiem took itself so seriously it was painful, for all concerned, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Mother doesn’t appear to take itself seriously at all, but somewhere lurking in both films is the need to activate the spectator, to make them less passive than they’d normally expect to be during the cinema experience. So much so that you could just about get away with calling it Brechtian.