In the biopic by Andrew Dominik, presented in Venice, it is not about the film career of the diva, but about her unfortunate story, starting from childhood
Of Marilyn Monroe, the last myth in the service of the cinema that was and that will never return, we have said everything, more and too much in these 60 years since that 4 August of 62 since we were orphaned by the artificial blonde diva. The film written and directed by Andrew Dominik, passed in Venice amidst critical bullets, no longer as inauguration as it was expected, arrived on September 28 on Netflix producer, without stopping in the premises. But beautiful, huge, liberty, crowded and applauding halls are seen in the film, with spectators standing in honor of the star who bows after the “prèmieres” of “Men prefer blondes” and “Niagara”, the noir that ends in macabre with “Kiss”, vintage 78s with death bells. About the cinema, the set, the directors, the Actor’s Studio, the travails of an actress – yet she was good, very much, she deserved that Oscar she never had – Dominik’s 166-minute film, which went through inevitable productive travails, speaks very little, life is already fiction.
It is the story, tinged with pure horror, of a woman with a schizophrenic and rootless mother who sees daddy, a daddy, in all the men she meets, who seduce her on the legendary sofa of the producers when there was no me too (Wenstein was not the first ….) , or marry her like the Italian-American Joe di Maggio, to President Kennedy who secretly receives her for a great oral sex performance while talking on the phone about the Cuban crisis (not the best scene). He misses and will always miss her real dad, never presented to her appeal: he writes to her but does not reach her and her letters also seem to be projections of her unhappy unconscious. Inspired by the beautiful fictionalized biography of Joyce Carol Oates, “Blonde”, in fact, published by Nave di Teseo, the film is a journey into the mind distorted by pain and then by medicines that should soothe the fatigue of living and being a diva without having no desire. In fact, the most surreal scenes in which Marilyn runs away without a goal, sees a fire from her childhood, cannot stand up, the world is for her a hallucination preserved under vacuum by the forced illusion of cinema and then by marriage, are very beautiful. in truth hasty (1956-61) with the playwright of the “Traveling Salesman” and the “Gaze from the Bridge” Arthur Miller, who is surprised that the girl knows the “Three Sisters” of Czechov (he has also read Dostoevksji!) and promises her that he will never write anything about her, while after her death he will remove his guilt complexes with the drama “After the Fall”, played only once in Italy by Vitti.
Sometimes a bit repetitive, the film has its own tragic power, it climbs into a dark forest that does not scratch the studios and directors of Marilyn’s films (you meet a fake Billy Wilder for a moment) of which you can see short digitally edited scenes with holograms of George Sanders in “Eve Versus Eve” and Tony Curtis in “Some Like It Hot”. Miss Monroe looks at the others and never thinks about them, because people see in her another woman, as Pirandello had already suggested. Her short life (as we know she died at 36, the age in which Greta Garbo retired) took place under the guise of a fake blonde, a fake naive, a fake happy diva. Paraphrasing Andrew Dominik’s other beautiful film, “The Murder of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, one might wonder whose hand that murdered Marilyn, even if, as in the book, the muted accusations against the politicians and a possible, umpteenth abortion to be eliminated, are quite explicit even if never confirmed. Now the mystery is unsolved, amen. After all, the biography of the prolific Oates, who has reviewed all the shame of the stars and stripes, is openly fictionalized to protect herself from causes.
Marilyn remains the non-distracted blonde, struck to death by the sense of guilt for two abortions, one voluntary but the other not, but innocent even if she allows herself to be on the sofa and is photographed in the calendars, always remaining that little girl waiting for daddy to come back, even if it was the last Clark Gable. The film is a horror-delirium of Marilyn’s conscience, with her diary sheets and her poems, her strange encounters (the sexy triangle with two well-known gay juniors, sons of Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson), it’s a commodity sold to the highest bidder, the public, who still adore Marilyn. It will all be in good faith this obsessive melò that operates without anesthesia the biography of MM. in which Ana de Armas first and Jessica Chastain then and Adrien Brody is Miller but does he look like Pavese? Or will I be, many wondered, yet another attempt to exploit its tragic posthumous fame? Marilyn, let’s not forget, is a face that repeats itself over and over again, as she had discovered with her multiples Andy Warhol and now the cinema is perhaps copying it.
September 28, 2022 (change September 28, 2022 | 11:04)
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