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Rating: "Summer sang in me for a while, and now it sings no more."
If anything is to be learned, after watching Bradley Cooper's second directorial work, which, despite depicting the humanity of a character who really lived and was not born from imagination, presents themes very close to those of his debut work, which was itself not original, namely A Star is Born, the American actor does not lack demons. Or if not so, he certainly doesn't lack talent and sensitivity to address very complex and delicate issues on screen.
A Star is Born and Maestro are two stories of love, music, depression, death.
With Maestro, Cooper turns back time, aware, as he rhetorically questioned and sang in Shallow, that this modern world is not a place of happiness and that perhaps some need more.
Cooper decides to wholly disregard the more political aspects of Leonard Bernstein's personality, such as his sympathy for Leninist ideas and movements like the Black Panther, which led journalist and writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term "radical chic" for his wife following a fundraising reception of New York's high society. This choice by Cooper is probably driven by a desire to cleanse the character of his potentially more divisive aspects, to focus on universal themes.
Never losing sight of the awareness that the reality portrayed is never "true" reality, but rather a pretext to open up to the world through art and to portray demons, indeed, as well as symbols and signs of the times. This aspect of cinematic representation should never be overlooked, especially when it concerns historical figures.
Thus, Maestro stages, with a display of close-ups, long takes, and significant visual virtuosity, the greatness of a fundamentally platonic love, between two people who love and accept each other even before they come to love and accept themselves.
And it teaches - or at least reminds us - that love can sometimes transcend sexuality and transcend, although cases of this kind are as rare as guessing the exact number the other is thinking of at that moment.
Always remember us this way.
Cinema cannot convey the complexity, the coherent contradictions, and the torments of a man and a woman, never entirely in any case. No form of art can do it, despite many artists having tried and often with commendable results. But the represented version will always be an amplification, whether positive or negative. An allegory.
Cinema is not life but a dream, meaning that significant, even if illusory, piece of life that unfolds when we are not awake and lose consciousness, and alongside it, the awareness of time and space.
And it is beautiful that it is so. After all, no dream is ever just a dream. As the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century reminded us at the end of his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut. Set during the Christmas period.
And finally, after winter, spring and summer can once again sing. Not always and not with the same intensity, but the cycle will always renew.
"The music never stopped, it overflowed like a spring and watered my completely withered soul" Yukio Mishima
Maestro is great cinema, with moments even quite difficult to endure, and above all, it features two actors both deserving of an Oscar.
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