Todd Phillips
Joker: Folie à Deux

This outrageous flop, the most reviled film of the year, amuses me. With audiences leaving the theater after just a few minutes and assorted banter following it around the web for the (perhaps excessive) presence of songs. The musical no one expected.

Let's say it right away: it's not a great work, but it nevertheless shows a certain courage. A work in subtraction, which essentially denies us the outrageous hyperboles of the previous chapter (also measured sparingly), which does not exploit the iconic potential of the clownish character, instead investigating the prostrate man behind the mask.

Wrong to frame it as a comic book film; instead, it is a dramatic movie that tries to understand something more about this deeply enigmatic figure, even for the author. Todd Phillips, as was already evident in 2019, does not have the pen to write great scripts and the dialogues are always a bit halting and clumsy. However, the intention remains, that of working on the contradictions of a depressed, psychiatric man, bent on himself.

The question is one of the oldest: was the evil committed by the man or by the alien monster that inhabits him? That boil, fueled by an ignoble, oppressed life, and by a society incapable of tending to its lost sheep, has it given birth to violence at Joker's hand? Or does all the evil reside in Arthur Fleck?

A clear answer is certainly not reached, and this is a good thing. Some will argue that there is no innovation in all this. True, but Phillips' work remains a cinema that activates the synapses, makes one think. And in 2024, that is not taken for granted.

The manner is rather original: between the Arkham prison and the Gotham courthouse, a drama unfolds that lives on unpredictable enthusiastic outbursts, in the numerous retro melodies of songs that the two protagonists bring to the scene. Here the director gets a bit carried away, should have reduced the quantity, but the choice remains notable: the enthusiasm of the solitary and devastated man blossoms entirely in the vocalizations and dances, choreographies that speak of death and life at the same time.

It's Arthur's dream dimension that reveals more to us. The show, the violence, the music, the love for Harley Quinn: the unrestrained dreams of a man seeking affection, redemption, the glitter of TV, a (pathetic) public redemption, but is irremediably stained by intrinsic violence. A violence that is self-destructive, in the first instance.

A sequel that, in fact, rows against itself, because the audience in the theater (like the people in the film) wants Joker, wants blood and macabre dances, does not care much for the man who wears his costume. When Arthur renounces Joker, he loses all interest, even from those who claimed to love him.

The commercial flop is thus nothing but a confirmation of all this: the monster exists because there is an audience that desires it. Without the monster, the audience also vanishes.

A nice way to commit suicide, Todd Phillips.