“Rapid naard or subtle commentary on celebrity in modern times? I honestly don’t know which side is on Blonde.” This comment posted on Twitter by Richard Lawson, the chief reviewer of Vanity Fair, says a lot about the questions and hesitations of the American press when discovering Andrew Dominik’s new film, posted on Netflix on September 28.
Presented at the last Venice, Deauville and Toronto film festivals, Blonde is the adaptation of the eponymous novel published by Joyce Carol Oates in 2000. Almost twenty years before the Weinstein affair and the #MeToo movement, the American novelist had made an impression with this work of fiction which was inspired by the life of Norma Jean Baker (1926-1962), the civil name of Marilyn Monroe.
A puzzle named Marilyn
Joyce Carol Oates repeated known facts from the actress’s biography, “but she was also inventing characters, speculating on others, and in the process creating a character named Marilyn Monroe,” recalls John Anderson, the television critic of the Wall Street Journal. The intimate portrait she composed of her heroine was a construction just as artificial as the Hollywood myth around Monroe. Against the stainless glamor of the platinum icon, he contrasted the distress and flaws of a woman exploited and crushed by the dream factory.
Some twenty years later, Andrew Dominic took over this material. Taking liberties both with the life of Norman Jean Baker and with Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, he takes Monroe’s character out of its envelope of words to plunge it back into the