Ana de Armas is extraordinary as Marilyn Monroe, however Andrew Dominik’s movie (coming quickly to Netflix) is a tragic whirlwind that traces the drama, humiliation and violence suffered by essentially the most photographed girl on the planet.

In a memorable sequence of the final James Bond film, “Dying Can Wait”, Ana de Armas performed a spy who teamed up with Agent 007. In “Blonde” (obtainable on Netflix from September 28), a movie by Andrew Dominik, the actress performs an icon, a legend, Marilyn Monroe. The brunette Latina has been reworked right into a blonde with blue eyes, imitating the look, gestures, voice, of essentially the most well-known of blondes.

Previewed on the American Movie Competition in Deauville, the place Ana de Armas acquired a Hollywood Rising Star Award and the place Andrew Dominik offered his western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, “Blonde” shouldn’t be a traditional biopic, it’s a fiction removed from the glamorous picture of the smiling star of Hollywood, an actual black novel that traces the dramas, humiliations and violence suffered by essentially the most photographed girl on the planet.

Greater than Marilyn, it’s Norma Jeane Baker (her actual title) that Ana de Armas performs on this adaptation of the guide by Joyce Carol Oates: “I’m the slave of this Marilyn Monroe (…) It’s not me, I’m not a star, I’m only a blonde,” says the actress. Marilyn smiled quite a bit, Norma Jeane cried quite a bit. Norma Jeane doesn’t need to play Marilyn anymore, a creature that exists solely on the display for 500 {dollars} per week. The movie insists on this nice misunderstanding, this irreconcilable hole between the picture of this blonde and what she actually is, intimately.

Disturbing reconstructions

To begin with, an unloved baby of her alcoholic, neurotic and at last institutionalized mom (Julianne Nicholson), positioned in an orphanage, rejected, traumatized, deserted by her father whom she is going to at all times search (calling the boys in her life “daddy”). A spouse unloved by her husbands, the champion Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and the author Arthur Miller (Adrian Brody). A girl humiliated, exploited, overwhelmed, raped, abused together with in a ridiculous sequence with John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Typically filming within the very locations the place she lived, Andrew Dominik has reconstructed, in an similar and disturbing means, well-known photographs, sequences recognized to all, the automobile of “Some Like It Scorching”, the steps of “Males Desire Blondes”, the capturing of “Seven Years of Reflection”, with the legendary white gown rising above a subway mouth.

Ana de Armas is an distinctive presence within the pores and skin of this “Blonde”, a really “manufactured” movie, with many results of realization, an alternation of sequences in colour and pictures in black and white, the elegant music of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, an exploded narration to respect “the hallucinatory nature of the novel”. However this movie is a narrative of nice unhappiness, a tragic and pitiful whirlwind, a pathetic accumulation of Marilyn’s many misfortunes, of her painful and humorous life, a lot in order that we’re lastly surprised. And haunted by the final picture, a lady useless on her mattress, in August 1962.

Patrick TARDIT

“Blonde,” a movie by Andrew Dominik, starring Ana de Armas (obtainable on Netflix beginning September 28).