The Mostra presented its event film on Wednesday, Blonde hair, a spectacular biopic on Marilyn Monroe that only festival-goers will be able to enjoy on the big screen in Venice, the rest of the spectators having to settle for a direct release on Netflix. The film will go live for 220 million subscribers on September 28.
The online video platform has cleverly raised expectations around this project, launched before the company suffered its first subscriber losses, under pressure from competition.
Other ambitious Netflix auteur films were presented in the Venetian competition, with varying success: Alejandro González Iñárritu lost his viewers in the meanders of his bardoNoah Baumbach has not regained the charm of his previous films with White Noisewhile Romain Gavras impressed with Athena.
But Blonde hair, fictional autobiography in 2 hours and 45 minutes of the Marilyn Monroe myth is the real test for the platform. And for the Mostra, which unlike Cannes, opens its doors wide to films that will not be released in traditional theaters.
It is the Cuban actress Ana de Armas, spotted in particular in James Bond girl in Dying can waitwhich was chosen to retrace the life and tragic end of a star crushed by the Hollywood machine.
Blonde hair promises a feminist and fictionalized re-reading of the journey of Norma Jeane Mortenson, Marilyn’s real name, who died in 1962 at the age of 36 after becoming an icon of popular culture.
His fate has already inspired a plethora of creators, from Andy Warhol and his portrayals to film My week with Marilyn with Michelle Williams ten years ago, to writers like Norman Mailer.
Blonde hairhe promises to throw a harsh light on the patriarchal system of Hollywood, without claiming to clarify the mystery which continues to surround his death.
It is based on the novel by the American Joyce Carol Oates, a fictitious but documented biography of the star, published in 2000. Through the nightmarish trajectory of Marilyn, abused by men and industry and who sought all her life an impossible love, she paints a vitriolic portrait of America in the 1950s and 60s.
“Sacred Cows”
Reconstruct, sometimes using archive photos, legendary sequences of the 7th art, such as Marilyn’s interpretation of Diamond’s are a Girl Best Friendsung in comedy Men prefer blondesis not the least of the challenges to which this biopic is measured.
Beyond glamour, the director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) with Brad Pitt, for which it is the first fiction film for a decade, promises to plunge the spectators into Marilyn’s psyche, from her dented childhood.
The film, whose ban on children under 17 in the United States has been described as “monumental bullshit” by the director, explores her tumultuous love life, a series of disappointments for an artist erected by the industry and the press in sex -symbol.
Blonde hair is “a review of American sacred cows”, promised the director, in an interview with the professional magazine Screen Daily.
It would not have been possible without the movement to denounce sexual abuse in the world of cinema, “because nobody before was interested in this kind of stuff: what it is to be a girl deprived of love , or what it’s like to go through Hollywood’s fresh meat grinder”.
Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody play two former husbands of Marilyn Monroe, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, respectively.
The soundtrack of the film is entrusted to rockers Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, relatives of the director to whom he has already devoted documentaries.