It was the most anticipated film of the year on the platform and with good reason because Blonde is a Herculean project. In addition to the eventful adaptation of a dark and fictionalized biography of the life of Marilyn Monroe of nearly 800 pages in project for more than 10 years, the film of 2 hours 45 minutes produced by Brad Pitt received an NC-17 classification. -rated in the US — a first for a Netflix original production. All the parameters were therefore in place to raise expectations. The final result, available on Netflix since Wednesday, will certainly not put out the fire. Through this intense, brutal and excessive work, Andrew Dominik leads us by all means into the emotional distress of the American icon. Number 1 of trends on Netflix, the film divides critics and spectators and on Rotten Tomatoes, it displays 49% of positive reviews against 51% of negative opinions. Why such a lack of consensus around such an ambitious feature film, adapted of a world best-seller by a renowned director? Attempt to explain. Laudable intention and praised interpretation On Netflix, Blonde appears in the category “films inspired by books” and “dramas”. By freeing himself from the very codified shackles of the biopic, Andrew Dominik can therefore allow himself all the freedoms with his subject, even risking overusing it. Accustomed to breaking genre barriers (the western with The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford and the gangster film with Cogan: Killing Them Softly), he therefore selected certain passages from a novel inspired by the life of the actress to give birth to a film that is more akin to a horror film than a biopic. Dominik does not copy Monroe, but risks counterfeiting her. Blonde is a coherent film, it is the means that justify the end. During these 2 hours 45 minutes of stylistic experimentation, the director constantly changes register, framing, color, format, but nothing is ever free. If Blonde is like nothing else and even gives us a new film to see with each shot, it always remains at the service of its purpose and never forgets its intention: to denounce the machismo and violence of Hollywood which destroyed a woman weakened by a violent childhood. To embody this tormented icon, Andrew Dominik first coveted Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts. It was finally Ana de Armas who took on this immense responsibility, with talent. If even before the release of the film, the accent of the actress of Cuban origin had fueled the scold, her performance finally made everyone agree. She goes from a perfect reproduction of the roles of Marilyn to a very personal interpretation of the star. For 2 hours 45 minutes, she is in every shot, going from tears to fake smiles in front of an intrusive camera, psychologically and physically, which gives the actress no respite, as history has given Monroe no respite. Andrew Dominik deconstructs – even demolishes – the Marilyn legend, the most cult moments of her life being those that the director mistreats the most on screen. He devotes only one scene to his relationship with President Kennedy, the object of all fantasies, but which is among the most violent and shocking in the film. The backstage of her legendary photograph in a white dress on the metro entrance is also one of the most edifying scenes where we see the actress resume the pose to infinity in a frenetic montage. Once the take is over, her smile instantly disappears but the ecstatic mouths of the male fans surrounding her stretch out and transform this oppressive crowd into a shapeless mass. Film “feel-bad” from start to finish, in the words of its director, Blonde is the story of a child who no one wanted to become the most desired woman in the world. From a little girl without a father figure who has become a woman surrounded only by men. From the daughter of a woman who did not want to be a mother to a woman who, all her short life, wanted to be a mother. To symbolize the heartbreak that these extremes have caused in the actress and the way in which her public life has parasitized his private life, Andrew Dominik puts his existence in abyss and mixes the two images in plans never seen in the cinema. The further the story progresses, the more it intertwines fantasies, fiction, dreams, nightmares and reality: Norma Jeane passes, in the same shot, from her bedroom to the cockpit of an airplane, from a peaceful beach to a preview crackling with flashes and the sheets of her marital bed are transformed into Niagara Falls, in reference to the film of the same name. Apart from her mother, no woman appears in Blonde and this plunge into Hollywood horror revolves only around men who have succeeded one another in Norma Jeane’s life and who have damaged or abused her: a father in a photograph (which hides a crack in the wall), rapist studio bosses, violent husbands, condescending directors or fans insatiable.Blonde does not compromise on the abuses of which Marilyn Monroe was the victim and this from its introduction, because Andrew Dominik chose to film only what he denounces and wants above all to put his public in the same voyeuristic position as that who scrutinized M arilyn Monroe throughout her life. But a double-edged reception But behind the clichés that the filmmaker wants to tear to pieces, the image of Marilyn Monroe remains the same: that of an eternal victim who eclipses all the rest of her personality, which has thus become one-dimensional . In her book, Joyce Carol Oates detailed the multiple roles of the actress, the way she worked on them and her love of poetry, which Andrew Dominik chose to eclipse. her public personality from which Norma Jeane suffered, she keeps repeating it for 2 hours 45 minutes: she is not Marilyn. However, it is only Norma Jeane as the victim of Marilyn that the film gives us to see. Dominik wants to pin down the macho violence of which the Hollywood icon was the certain victim and therefore only tells her story through the prism of abusive relationships. that men have had with her. Defined only by her childhood trauma and the abandonment of her father, adult Norma Jeane nicknames – in an absolutely sordid way – all the important men in her life “Daddy”. The director dedicates his film to denouncing the appropriation of the actress’ image by the general public, but also appropriates her image by reinterpreting her story as he pleases. From this flow of meticulously thought out and edited images results a unprecedented and unforgettable film that grabs us from the first to the 160th minute and drags us, almost by force, into the whirlwind of the psychological distress of the actress, without any moment of calm. Extreme in content, form and in the reactions it provokes, Blonde is a landmark film.
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