Review Detail

I was extremely excited to see this after reading all of the positive reviews, but unfortunately this fanedit just didn’t really do much for me.

My biggest gripe is that I never believed, not for one second, that Randy is Nina’s father, or that Randy was once married to Nina’s mother. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where those worlds would have collided, and the viewer never gets a sense from the Black Swan side of things that there was ever a father in the picture. The synopsis claims that Randy is “rekindling a relationship with his estranged daughter,” but that rekindling is not seen nor implied, with the exception of a phone call that we don’t see Nina listen to.

I also found much of the movement between the two films extremely jarring. The darker tone, more suspenseful music and hallucinatory images of Black Swan generally did not mesh well with the more traditional stylings of The Wrestler. Only one of the split screen edits worked for me, and there were several instances where intercutting between each film seemed unmotivated. I didn’t think there was much cohesion between each storyline, and I rarely felt like I was watching one movie with parallel stories. Instead, it mostly felt like two (excellent) movies that kept interrupting each other.

This fanedit is not without its bright spots, however. I thought the ending was absolutely terrific. There are a number of genuinely clever and interesting juxtapositions of images and sounds. Q2 did a good job crafting a consistent visual style between the two films. And The Wrestler and Black Swan are terrific films in their own right, so I enjoyed watching scenes from each film in a new context, and this contributed heavily to my overall enjoyment of the fanedit.

Despite those positive elements, I (reluctantly, because I loved the concept) would not recommend this fanedit. Memories Alone flounders at forming the narrative it purports to tell, and the two films it draws from are not as harmonious a pair as I had hoped or expected.