Yo
Blonde It is not a biographical film. biopic (biographical picture), but something very different: the fiction of a life based on the homonymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which I am not going to discuss here. This is the ignition button when undertaking any approach to the film by New Zealand director Andrew Dominik, which has just been released on Netflix on September 28. Warning it means warning the reader about a kind of carte blanche to fabulate that, at the end of the day, ends up as the great Achilles’ heel of a genetically grim, abrupt and viscous film about the duality Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe (MM), one of the most powerful icons of American popular culture of all time.
In 1984 the director Milos Forman was able to fable/fiction in Amadeus with the figure of the musician Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart imagining/projecting zones of shadow and even of envy and criminality on the Italian composer Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), done without major consequences on the receivers, except naturally in the cases of connoisseurs, scholars and musicologists. But in Blonde has made the mistake of trying to do the same with a living myth, read, researched, interpreted and sense from practically all possible angles, a brake on the positive social assimilation of the budgets with which the film operates.
Two of those budgets weigh down, in my opinion, the proposal that Dominik gives us after a long process of laborious gestation and making of his film. The first is the exaggerated weight it gives to psychologizing constructs that end up distorting, sometimes grotesquely, a figure like MM, hardly reducible to an unknown father, a mother with paranoid schizophrenia, abuse, and two frustrated motherhoods. The evil is deep down: the director himself has unequivocally acknowledged that he “was not interested in reality but in the images“and that “there are many psychological processes that are dramatized in Blondemany Lacanian and Freudian ideas“…
The second originates from the translation to celluloid of the me too when exposing a MM victimized by the patriarchal culture and held as an object of desire, that is, in the idea that it was only a piece of meatconveyed in a scene in which two safe she is dragged against her will to the temple of sex. This itself leads to other unfortunate moments, perhaps none as badly billed as the president’s fellatio, which to top it off takes place in a room with the door open and a member of the Secret Service at the entrance and surrounded by true phallic pastiches (! horror, horror, say Hitchcock!) like a rocket taking off on a TV screen on the other side of the bed. Undoubtedly one of the burdens of the delivery, but not for ethical or moral considerations, but for its Manichaeism and clumsiness.
And also, without a doubt, an action that, together with expendable nudity and scenes of sexual violence, must have contributed enough for the film to be classified NC-17. (Not One Seventeen and Under Admitted). “The Motion Picture Association’s harshest rating has long been known as a box office killer and publicity giveaway,” comments one reviewer, but like The murder of Jesse James by the cowardly Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly, from the same director, this film “you don’t have to worry about movie tickets. After all, it will be mostly watched by people at home on Netflix.”
But there is more. The film even speculates about the existence of a love triangle between MM and the actors Charles Chaplin Jr. (1925-1968) and Edward Robinson Jr. (1933-1947), for which there is no historical evidence. There is also no evidence that Norma Jeane’s mother tried to kill her by blaming her for the separation from her father (the script distorts statements by Arthur Miller, who once claimed that her MM’s mother had threatened to kill her three times) .
In short, there is in this film a true license to kill James Bond. Down that hole of alice in wonderland falls off. And that’s why it ends up presenting the image of a MM on the other side of the mirror.
II
One of the few merits of Blonde It is the performance of Ana Celia de Armas Caso, a Cuban born in 1988 and raised in the small town of Santa Cruz del Norte, a Hollywood galaxy, and until now only known, if anything, for her rum factory. It is already the new acquisition of the industry in films such as No Time to Die (2020), where she plays the role of a Cuban CIA agent alongside the James Bond of the hour, actor Daniel Craig. Or that girl who works alongside Keanu Reeves in Knock, Knock (2015). With her performance in Blondede Armas surpasses the work of actresses who have previously embodied MM on celluloid, in particular Mysty Rowe (Goodbye Norma Jean1976) and Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn, 2011).
And it is no small matter to have achieved it despite of his ethnicity, a challenge that producers like Brad Pitt accepted from the beginning. The decision must be seen in the context of a movement aimed at breaking the traditional roles of minorities in Hollywood, particularly Latinos or Hispanics, visible in the leading roles given for some time to this part to actresses such as the Spanish Penélope Cruz or the Mexican Salma Hayek and the Spanish Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem. De Armas, in effect, is neither American, nor bilingual, nor bicultural, and despite this, she was given the task of embodying one of the most powerful myths not only of the United States but of the 20th century.
But the fact of selecting it has had a negative impact on a sector of critics and especially the public, in which it is sometimes difficult to separate the classic essentialism from the anti-immigrant prejudices that characterize much of the United States today. Typically, the blow has tended to focus on the way the Cuban actress speaks English, a fact that certainly did not mark Mel Gibson even remotely when in Brave Heart did that extraordinary characterization of William Wallace, the Scottish national hero who of course didn’t speak American Standard English but English with the phonetic and phonological standard characteristic of Scotland.
My opinion about the Cuban is not based only on the physical characterization, masterfully achieved by hours of makeup before filming, nor on the capture of movements and the peculiar way of speaking of MM on stage (breathy speaking) thanks to the work of the couches, but in something that goes further: capturing the behavioral traits of a woman who in life, according to Jane Fonda, “radiated light and vulnerability”. And of course there is no chauvinism in the assertion. As a sample button, it is enough to remember that her acting work has been endorsed by recognitions, nominations and awards that are not at all contaminated by national origin, including the Hollywood Rising Star at the Deauville America Film Festival (2022), the Best Actress in a action film, awarded by the Saturn Awards (2021), and Best Actress in an International Production, by the Actors and Actresses Union Awards (2020). “She seems possessed by the spirit of MM, sentenced a critic”.
Photo: Netflix.
Ana de Armas then entered her leading role through the front door, except for being in one of those films that went for wool and came out shorn.
