Review "The Wrestler" by Darren Aronofsky

This film is tough. Anyone who's seen "Pi" or "Requiem for a Dream" will know that Aronofsky doesn't hold back when it comes to telling a story, and "The Wrestler" follows in that tradition. I can't comment on "The Fountain" because I haven't seen it, and only found out about it last month.

"The Wrestler" tells the story of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, 20 years after his peak as a pro-wrestler. He still wrestles on weekends, in the local scene, but he's a shadow of his glory days - emotionally, financially, physically. The Ram works out the back of a local supermarket, lives in a caravan, has trouble keeping up with the rent, is a regular at the local strip club, lives from day to day, weekend to weekend, fight to fight. Things change when he has a heart attack and is told he can't wrestle - this brush with death leads the wrestler to think about what he is left with when wrestling is taken away. He also seeks to re-establish contact with his twenty-something daughter who has long since moved out and moved on from a father who was never there for her.

This story is paralleled with that of an aging stripper at the club that Randy frequents. Once again, the film explores the options of people who have been used up by their occupations, and are rapidly approaching the point at which they're about to be spat out of a machine that has no more need of them. In the case of the wrestler, there's no plan, no idea and no opportunities - just a big black hole of a world that has moved on way beyond his 80's cock-rock glory days. The stripper has it together and plans on a different job, moving into a house in a different suburb and finding a reasonable school for her son to go to.

The film doesn't go into much of the detail of the wrestling world: very quickly it comes out clean regarding match-fixing if you could even call it that - performance is probably a better word - and doesn't go into the financial exploitation of the wrestlers at all. All of the wrestlers who have it together certainly aren't relying on the sport as their main income. Instead the main theme of the film is that of people who are capable of maintaining control over their circumstances, adapting to change and challenges and not being consumed by their weaknesses, flaws, doubts, fears and addictions. "Pi" and "Requiem for a dream" have already covered that territory well enough, and in a way it feels that perhaps "The Wrestler" hasn't sufficiently distanced itself from that familiar territory. Perhaps after "The Fountain" Aronofsky decided, or was persuaded, to go back to what works and/or what he's known for.

Make no mistake that "The Wrestler" is a fine film and Mickey Rourke's performance is visceral and splendid. The film is violent in parts, not when you expect it to be, and it sets itself in Aronofsky's familiar territory at the unacknowledged and unmentioned fringes of society. There is an abundance of hand-held camera scenes following the wrestler about - giving a similar feel to "Rosetta" or other dogma-influenced films - but the editing is spot-on and the score will remind you how far the rock guitar has gone since the 80's (depending on what you're listening to now...).

Did it deserve to get the Leon d'Oro? Having missed Miyazaki's "Ponyo by the sea" and Barbaret Schroeder's film, I can't say - although as far as displays of filmmaking go, Takeshi did just as well as Aronofsky in my opinion. Mickey Rourke did deserve some acknowledgement of his sensational performance, far more than anybody associated with the terrible "Papa di Giovanna". Based on the few films I saw, I'd have to accede to the viewpoint that the 65th mostra features some fine films but nothing really new (perhaps Schroeter's impenetrably dark queer-fetish "Nuit de chien" came close as a contribution but it leaned a little too heavily on "Eraserhead" and "28 Days Later..." for my liking).

Now that we've figured out the abbonamento system and the "four different ticketing arrangements for three cinemas" anti-system, I think I'm actually looking forward to next years' film festival...