The danger of 90s nostalgia

For those of us who forged our cinephilia between the 1980s and 1990s, looking back on that past with nostalgia is an unavoidable temptation. And it is precisely this idealized vision that originates and at the same time promotes Stray bullet, the new film by Darren Aronofsky, which set the action of the film in 1998, just the year in which the Brooklyn filmmaker became known with the stylized and paranoid Pine. Now, with his new love letter to a bygone, untamed New York, Aronofsky invites the viewer to remember a Hollywood in which original stories and unpredictable characters mattered more than the sheen of digital effects, an era of films that weren't afraid to delve into the catacombs of social life and the spirit. Thus, when Aronofsky explains to Stray bullet the descent into hell of an immature and alcoholic bartender, it is difficult not to remember those golden years of American cinema in which directors like David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson took advantage of the push of the cinema of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers.

Unfortunately, Aronofsky's authorial dimension – based on his obsession with the Stations of the Cross with a moralistic whiff – has never been comparable to that of his generation, which has made him a director too indebted to narrative and visual effects. In this sense, Stray bullet wants to be a black comedy about the absurdity of existence (in the style of the Coen brothers), a violent meditation on revenge (Tarantino) and a reflection on the weight of guilt (Anderson), but it ends up in no man's land, given over to bad taste, crude drama and an analog aesthetic simulated with digital filters. Stray bullet I would like to be the new one What a night! by Martin Scorsese, but remains a striking and forgettable heir to Snatch (pigs and diamonds) by Guy Ritchie.