Bryan Singer
Bohemian Rhapsody

The unfortunate Rami Malek gave it his all, it's not his fault. It's the fault of those who believe that making a film about a rock band means executing an imitation, with look-alike actors and meticulous reconstructions of outfits, on-stage gestures, mustaches, and hairstyles. This isn’t a film; it's an extended celebratory music video lasting two hours with tedious dialogued transitions between one song and another.

The Mr. Robot actor unfortunately lacks even a fingernail’s worth of the charisma of the real Freddie Mercury. Poor guy, he just doesn’t have the physique, the stage presence, not even just to imitate the flamboyant singer. If you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to cast someone who played (excellently) the part of a sociopathic hacker to portray a monster of vitality and sensuality like Mercury. If we add to this the fact that the supporting characters aren’t exactly lively, we clearly see the paradox of a film that saddens more than it transmits adrenaline. It saddens not for an existential reading, but precisely for the lack of flair.

To this, we add the mostly misguided screenplay choices. Many ideas, none well developed. It seems like a booklet of banalities from the rockstar world, a bit like Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born but without the grit and passion of those two protagonists. The difficult relationships with the father, the clashes with producers, the singer's egocentrism, his unrestrained sexual life, the snakes surrounding him. Many issues, all predictable and not very engaging, crammed in like this are not even well developed (because many minutes are taken up by songs).

If that weren't enough, the film undergoes heavy censorship essentially leading to talking about Freddie's dissolute life without ever truly showing it. An absurd moralism that can be well understood by reading Sacha Baron Cohen's statements, who wanted to delve into the details of the singer's life as the protagonist, but producer Brian May disagreed. Thus, the commendatory purpose of the entire operation becomes clear. A politically correct work that simply wants to assert that the credit wasn't all Freddie’s. And that, in the end, even he realized this. A game of weights and balances that’s a bit shady, which interests no one aside from Brian May and company.

The direct intervention of the band also explains the absurd choice to close triumphantly with the 1985 Live Aid and cut out the more difficult part of Fred’s life, which led him to his death from AIDS. In essence, the salacious, scandalous, and tragic aspects of the Queen story are almost completely expunged, treated with a modesty that seems to mimic that of those times.

A film that's flawed right from the foundation. The shots, the staging, the atmospheres. There’s just no pathos, they can’t create a vibration even remotely rock. The Live Aid sequence could be a model for how not to represent a concert in a film. Strong sensations of green screen, a few extras in tight shots of the audience that don’t convey the sensation of the crowd. But still better than the studio recording scenes (those for A Night at the Opera are amusing, the others...), or those with the producer-snakes, the sickly sentimentalism with Mary. Many unjustified, sugary, forcibly tending toward a happy ending that evidently never existed.

4/10