“Blonde”: in the nightmares of Marilyn Monroe

Ana de Armas en Marilyn Monroe martyre.

Posted Sep 27, 2022, 3:00 PMUpdated Sep 27, 2022, 3:30 PM

Released in 2000, “Blonde” is a best-selling and major novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is also a source of misunderstandings: the author never claimed to write a biography of Marilyn Monroe but a fiction inspired by her life. But the success of his book was such that it became a reference. Its transposition to the screen will add to the confusion. “Blonde” by Andrew Dominik is hitting Netflix in the wake of numerous productions on entertainment and sports personalities. It should therefore be remembered that this film is not a biopic of Marilyn, but the adaptation of a Marilyn from a novel reinterpreted by the director of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”.

trip to hell

The plot follows the fate of the actress more or less faithfully: Norma Jean, an unhappy little girl, grows up in her father’s absence, becomes a pin-up then an American myth by advancing in a world that will devour her.

The strength of Joyce Carol Oates’ text lay in her art of multiplying and entangling points of view. After 1,000 pages, Marilyn, offered to the eyes of the world by Hollywood, remained elusive. Dominik chose to make a horror film out of it, a trip to hell, punctuated by rare rays of light. The result unfolds a series of rowdy horrific tableaux, stretched over more than two and a half hours. Marilyn Monroe, courageously portrayed by Ana de Armas, sees herself reduced to a sacrificial figure. The original novel is raw but the writing, by its very nature, leaves room for the imagination. Dominik imposes his images heavily, literally opens the star to film her from the inside in medical sequences. Old banal fantasy: X-rays of the actress’s lungs were once sold for $45,000 at an auction in Las Vegas.

A secret

Until after her death, no woman was as scrutinized as Marilyn Monroe. But she only sends us the definition of Diane Arbus’ photography: “A secret about a secret. The more she tells you, the less you know. Because in reality, we know very little about Marilyn Monroe. Gold “Blonde” reduces all its complexity to its fragility. In addition, the film forgets her heritage, which remains to us very concretely from Marilyn’s passage: her work. Curiously, Andrew Dominik is hardly interested in it and persists in not seeing the most obvious: Marilyn Monroe was first and foremost an immense film actress.

Blonde hair

American movie

by Andrew Dominick.

With Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale. 2:46 a.m. On Netflix.

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