Guillermo del Toro’s film tells the rise of a scammer in a disturbing world: a circus of immorality
The meeting between director Guillermo del Toro and writer William Lindsay Gresham seemed written in things: there were too many possible affinities between the disturbing fantasy of his cinematic fairy tales and the equally disturbing and provocative universe of Nightmare Alley, the novel that gave its author ephemeral popularity (released in 1947) and that Sellerio has meritoriously made available to the Italian public. An affinity and a harmony that can begin with the circus setting of The Fair of Illusions, in a low-level amusement park like those that thrived in the provincial cities of Depression America and in which the young Stan Carlisle finds an occasional job. (Bradley Cooper), who we just saw his past burn down along with the house he set on fire.
Skilled builder of disturbing universes, del Toro plunges his protagonist into a world that seems to want to tempt him from all sides, torn between the brash charm of Zeena (Toni Colette), the seer who deceives the gullibility of the public with the help of the older Pete (David Strathairn) , too dependent on the bottle to react to Stan’s ambiguous presence, and, conversely, the disturbing immorality of Clem (Willem Dafoe), the circus master, collector of fetuses in spirit and master of limitless cynicism. Among them, Carlisle will discover how one can reduce oneself to a sub-human level (like the geek, the beast-eater attraction with which the circus tickles the morbidity of the public) or remain innocent despite the squalor, as Molly (Rooney Mara) does. but also learn how to deceive the public by exploiting their weaknesses and their need for consolation.
And Stan immediately takes the lesson, champion of that selfishness and of that cynicism that seems necessary to him to pursue a very personal American dream, which is made up of success, of money but above all of contempt for others. Whether it’s Pete (from whom she learns the tricks of the trade), whether it’s Zeena (resigned to seeing him go) or Molly, whose heart she’ll know how to take.
Concrete and muscular director, far from halftones and from the nuances, here del Toro (also screenwriter with his wife Kim Morgan) seems to abdicate that horror reading of reality that had made his popularity and opts for a portrait bordering on the didactic of the increasingly ambitious rise of a scammer. The noir component that was present in the pages of the novel and that had made the strength of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 version (the one that Tyrone Power had forced Fox to produce to change his image as an eternal seducer) in favor of an illustration disappears completely. more readable and less ambiguous. The world in which Stan moves has the pastel colors of some twentieth-century American painting (the most disturbing Grant Wood, the Edward Hopper more nocturnal) where the sky is always corrugated and the clouds – which bring only thunderstorms or snow – seem to have canceled the sun, but above all it reveals a humanity where deceit and gullibility allow characters without morals to thrive. Until they meet even more cynical and immoral people.
And right in the final confrontation between the scammer and his (apparent) accomplice, the icy psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who the film fully reveals her ambitions, those of a moral fable that uses America at the turn of the Second World War, between poverty and fear (the film begins in the late thirties and ends in the early forties), to force the viewer to reflect on his weaknesses. Because it is precisely the deceived, the gullible, the deluded, the real protagonists of the film: it is their fears, their weaknesses that we end up wanting to be passionate about, rather than Stan’s tricks that he will find himself prisoner of a role that he will not be able to play. than betray him. But almost painless, certainly without repentance. The real drama will forever remain off-screen. Together with those who have believed and been deceived.
January 25, 2022 (change January 25, 2022 | 20:42)
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