09 September 2022 16:50
In this 79th edition that celebrates the ninetieth year of existence of the Venice Film Festival, if there are many Italian ones (but Piero Zardo wrote about these) there are so many US productions in competition including several Netflix branded ones. Which seem to fail more and more when they do not have a high-level director behind them, such as Noah Baumbach with his White noise of which we have given account in the first breaking latest news, or of Jane Campion with The power of the dog that last year in Venice won the Silver Lion. This is the case of one of the most anticipated titles of the competition, Blondebiography of Marilyn Monroe that one would like to have a little visionary and dreamlike signed by Andrew Dominik, a director who is actually not bad – we will remember The murder of Jesse James at the hands of the coward Robert Fordpresented in Venice in 2007 – but whose filmography has never flourished in the great cinema.
Adapting the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, Dominik takes up the concept of total immersion in the psyche of the actress through a remote setting and an exploded narrative structure, fragmented to excess, but a visually icy work emerges which, despite some beautiful dream sequence, fails to fascinate despite dealing with one of the most magical, as well as tragic, characters in the history of Hollywood: Norma Jean, aka Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962 after quickly reaching maximum success. She was really a hinge actress, as well as very good: a bit pin-up, she was nevertheless the last great actress and icon of cinema modernity before that of postmodernity.
Cultured, intelligent, sensitive, in her diary she asked in vain to be heard because there were so many things she had to say and for this reason she aspired to roles with intelligent or sensitive characters compared to those who had brought her to fame. She had it right at the end of her human story, when the great John Huston took her for a metaphysical and existentialist film like The displaced (1961) with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, the latter no less tormented than her, and written by the writer Arthur Miller, husband of Monroe.
Of the many traumas experienced by the actress since childhood Blonde he chooses a few, all important, trying to illustrate the state of splitting in which the actress (Norma and Marilyn) constantly lived and the great suffering that ensued because she was torn apart in her self. But the symbology and the filmic construction as a whole remain rather superficial and scholastic. And the director, for a beautiful dreamlike yet claustrophobic sequence of a devastating fire along the Californian streets, trivializes ten others: immediately immerses the queen of glamor in a constant and flat white light that seems to already want to enunciate her existence made of emptiness, of a tormented limbo, of a suspension in unhappiness waiting for the conquest of true happiness, a chimera pursued permanently. But only coldness comes out.
Blondewhich will be on Netflix starting from 23 September, leaves the impression of a great missed opportunity and of a title more out of competition, a sector where it was instead inserted Dead for a dollar, the inspired and nonconformist western of the eighty-year-old Walter Hill, as always transversal to genres and cinemas, who without ideological heaviness gives women and blacks a revenge that brings the flavor of justice. It will arrive in theaters with Universal Pictures.
Another Netflix production but completely catastrophic is Athena, from the elementary and somewhat ridiculous symbologies close to Greek myths, signed by the French Romain Gravas, on whose three-part script also the most celebrated Ladj Ly collaborated. Adrenaline and anxiety-inducing to the extreme, aesthetically algid to the inhuman intends to be from the first minute an immersion without a moment of respite in a revolt within one of the many cité where the children of third or even fourth generation immigrants are imprisoned, a revolt that almost immediately turns into a war that is a bit tribal and medieval.
Films like this are so flat that they run out of evidence of what they want to say and that at the end of the screening we are already certain that we will never want to see again: to savor and to scratch what in the image or in the interstices of the narration (understood in a broad sense, from the script to the editing)? Gravas seems to want to tell us that he is moved by an urgency while he is only adolescent in the negative sense: politically immature and simplistic he seems to easily praise the civil war. He has the same faults that he had in his time Hate by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995), which also had some merit, but reveals much more schematism and conveys much more aesthetic ugliness which, however, could seduce less aware spectators among the younger audience.
Instead a French film like Saint-Omer by the black rookie Alice Diop refers to the Greek myth of Medea with much more brazen finesse, revealing itself to be one of the great surprises of the festival, perhaps the most beautiful title so far and certainly the most unexpected. It will be Minerva Pictures to bring it to our theaters and we do not exclude at all, not only for the rumors that circulate, that the jury could assign a prize to the film. It is the story, taken from a real and recent story, of the trial of a black woman accused by French justice of killing her fourteen-month-old daughter – a murder she admitted and of which she cannot explain – and of the black writer Rama. that attends the process while remaining proven.
A disturbing and seductive work, exciting and profound, mysterious and constantly on the crest not only between white rationality-justice and black irrational-ancestral world, but between a Cartesian logic like the French one and an “other” logic. Already Pasolini, who made a film adaptation of Medea which later went down in history, said that the French denote in many respects much more acquired civilization than the cultures of poor countries but that on the other hand have more difficulty in understanding them in depth, because they are imbued with Cartesian rationality. .
Nonetheless Saint-Omer it is not unique and makes us see all the shadows questioning the viewer until the end – and even after the end – about the ambiguity and complexity of reality. Laurence Coly, as you want to consider it, is however an absolutely unclassifiable UFO that defies all canons just like this magnificent film, which uses the question of motherhood as a tool for reading identity: a very vast theme, which encompasses many others. sub-themes. What are women made of? Scientific research, and therefore very real, on the chimera cells that all women carry within them, with which the director creates a connection with the myth of Medea, intrinsically makes women mutant beings unique and at the same time suffering. This is the brother film of the novel Blonde of Oates that Dominik’s film does not know how to reinvent. After some reflection, even if a few titles remain to be discovered, Saint-Omer is our Golden Lion.
The banshees of Inisherin is another gem written and directed by Irish-born Londoner Martin McDonagh after the magnificent Three posters in Ebbing, Missouri that Walt Disney Italia should bring to theaters on February 2 next year with the title of The spirits of the island, which perhaps empties a bit of expressive and evocative power from the title as well as the film. The bansheein fact, in the Irish tradition they are the fate of witches, but hieratic witches, bearers of a knowledge, a truly mysterious “vision” which is a form of knowledge in some cases even revolutionary and for this reason respected by the world a little laughable and obtuse represented here, that of an Irish community more or less obtuse and capable of waging war for incomprehensible jokes that might have inspired Ionesco, father of the theater of the absurd.
Come in Three posters in Ebbing, Missouri, McDonagh sets his narrative in a closed place whose community is mentally closed, where a woman is the only character out of sync, and masterfully mixes drama and comedy bordering on the comic – we often laugh – without this detracting from anything. the gravity of the issues represented. Even this title seems to have excellent opportunities, in particular for the almost literary quality of the screenplay, to obtain an award, all the more true if we consider the presence in the jury of a writer like Kazuo Ishiguro.
Clear, clear and light like a spring day. Constantly immersed in a sort of quiet of the spirit despite the many family upheavals – as if it were told by someone who has achieved total inner peace despite the hardships of life – is the intense, fine and very pleasant Love life by the Japanese Koji Fukada – which from today Teodora Film brings to Italian cinemas – certainly one of the two revelations of the competition (and not only) together with Saint-Omer.
The denied youth, and moreover in the family itself, also recurs in at least three films of the competition. As in Diop’s film, where the death of a child dominates the entire narrative despite being off-screen, and in The son by Florian Zoller – another title of the competition from aseptic and soulless director and photography despite a greater subtlety in the script – where there is perhaps an announced death of a teenager, while here very soon there is the unexpected and accidental death of a little boy, Keita. And in all three films the narrative focuses on who remains, but in a very different way along the three works.
Fukada’s film is actually a whirlwind of denials of the other or the other with respective awareness by everyone, even if in some cases perhaps only partial, but with consequent forgiveness: the awareness of the ex-husband of the mother of Keita, deaf-mute of South Korean origins, for having abandoned them and later because she also abandoned her son and Korean mother; on her part for not having understood that her ex-husband needed help and obviously because of her carelessness which resulted in the death of her child. And it doesn’t end there: we leave it to the viewer to discover everything else. But in the end an original and precise photograph of social mechanisms and its complex ramifications emerges, however, captured through the family prism. And how the fact that loneliness in Japanese society is a widespread human condition perhaps depends on its beginning in the family.
However, the continuous family upheavals arise along the narrative without being exhibited, there is no grandiloquence: the dramaturgical mechanisms are almost anesthetized in this sweet and pervasive quiet that envelops the neighborhood mirroring the film and whose panoramas open and close it not by chance. . The director talks to us about death to better talk about life, he pushes us to return to life, to a resurrection of desire and the meaning of life, of how this, despite everything, is always and in any case not only necessary but inevitable. Love life, as the title states, it is in truth an extraordinary elegy to life made starting from the minimal, prosaic everyday life, which communicates love, poetry and a form of optimism without rhetoric and sentimental molasses to the viewer. Such a miracle of acrobatics is very rare and therefore its vision is not to be missed.