Blonde
The image is more than the person, but we can never really
know the person, so let's figure out what we can from the image
dir: Andrew Dominik
2022
Three hours of this. Three hours of mostly misery.
Blonde is the 2 hours and 47 minutes long fictionalised biopic based not on Marilyn Monroe’s actual life but on a book by Joyce Carol Oates. There is some crossover between the two (Marilyn’s actual life and the book), and then there’s the third filter through which Andrew Dominik wedges the story through his screenplay.
I don’t think anyone over the age of 40 or so will confuse this with actual Earth history. To younger people, who from what I hear don’t ever watch movies anyway, this might become the bible on a person they don’t know and don’t remember. But to the rest of us she’s still a well-known figure from the last century, up there with Gandhi, Hitler, Churchill, Michael Jackson and Big Bird from Sesame Street. An icon. Maybe the icon, or at least the blonde icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
To us, just to generalise massively, she was more famous as the icon than she was an actor or a person, as a reference more than for any performance. As an image, through countless famous images, of a certain idea of femininity or sexuality that had nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with her as a product.
This flick tries to say a lot about the person, as opposed to the icon, to explain her deep sadness, to show us all the many reasons for her deep sadness, and to deliver it in a complicated, visually stunning, musically depressing, very long package that emphasises the psychological over the literal historical.
In other words, a highly stylised fictionalisation intended to reveal the “truth”.
Whatever. The film has a moody, melancholy score from usual suspects (for this director) Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and uses black and white stock, and every possible film aspect ratio that Dominik had access to, all for the purposes of replicating a ream of famous photos of her with the intention of fleshing her character out by elaborating on the world she lived in, that existed leading up to and following immediately after those iconic shots.
Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier, the main character in this flick isn’t Marilyn Monroe, it’s actually this lesser known girl called Norma Jeane Mortenson (Ana de Armas).
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