Andrew Dominik
Blonde

"My body ages but I have yet to be born," said Marilyn Monroe about herself.

Marilyn, you died before you were ever born, says Giancarlo Dotto in a beautiful book, The God That Isn't There, a book about myths and mythomania. Reading this reference to Marilyn, I thought back to Blonde. A controversial film and one of the most discussed in recent years.

Perhaps in this lies the tragic parabola of Norma Jean and the very essence of Dominik's film. Marilyn died before she was born, like the children she carried in her womb. She never lived because she led a life of torment and pain, loved (very few times truly, perhaps only by Arthur Miller) but also mocked, insulted, outraged, used, and discarded.

Happiness was not in Marilyn's destiny, but rather becoming, despite herself, one of the great iconic/tragic figures of the twentieth century. Crushed by the weight of an alter ego she wanted to create to escape her own story, turning to the circle of light the hope of redemption from a history marked from childhood by suffering and pain. The pain of abandonment, mistreatment, loneliness.

Which led her to pour into adulthood a need for attention and love, too much to be reciprocated. This manifested itself above all in the tender and naive search for a father figure, in every husband, and in the illusion that the real father might want her back one day.

Blonde is not the real Marilyn; it's based on a fictional novel by Joyce Carrol Oates, but it captures the main aspect of the great diva’s parabola, that of a suffering that, aesthetically, Dominik renders in black and white as well as in color, in one format and another, in an alternation of styles that makes it undoubtedly an unusual and in its way experimental film, but it finds great effectiveness thanks mainly to Ana De Armas’s Oscar-worthy performance. If it were up to me, she would have received the statuette immediately.

Blonde is a courageous and in certain aspects even extreme, disturbing, almost horror film. A slow descent into a nightmare with no return, made of despair, abuse, hallucinations. The darkest side of America and Hollywood. Punctuated by harrowing phone rings that represent omens of misfortune and death. Blonde also deserves credit for demystifying (definitively?) the figure of Kennedy, never as uniquely negative, squalid, and repellent as in this film. Never had Kennedy been portrayed stripped of any form of idealization as in Dominik's film.

A great film but an experience at times also shocking, not to everyone’s taste, with questionable choices but which make it even more of a precious work and, for better and/or worse, memorable.

In its almost three-hour spiral of horror, it shows the worst side of humanity that swallows and crushes every form of innocence, behind the artificial construction of dreams and myths.