'Mank', the most brilliant and agonizing genius of David Fincher with Orson Welles in the background

Every director, or artist in general, has the right to his own agony, to his moment of sad glory just before disappearing.

If cinema, as someone said, is the art in which the sense of time itself reverberates, there is something unfailingly morbid, pleasing and cloudy, in acquiring full awareness of the final moment which, why not, is also the beginning.

The nuance matters.

'

', which crashes

na in very few cinemas on November 20 and December 4 on Netflix, it is in order: a) the abbreviation of Mankiewicz, Hermann J., who was a dipsomaniac screenwriter of the golden age of Hollywood, author of some of the libretti of the Marx brothers and brother himself of Joseph L., the author of '

;

b) the punctilious description of one of the most deliciously absurd and hypnotic polemics in the history of cinema:

;

c)

;

d) a rereading of the mechanism of power in democracy now that so many headaches bring us false news, stories and accounts, and, more important than all of the above, e)

The one in question, as in the case of 'Rome' or 'The Irishman', of a Netflix production does nothing but add fuel to the fire.

From the agony;

ours in times of pandemic and perhaps Fincher's own.

More wood The film is based on an old script that the director's father himself,

he left written before he died in 2003. David Fincher actually, and as if it were a specular reproduction of the relationship that Welles himself had with Mankiewicz, takes the libretto as his starting point and from there builds an entire universe at the time just the dawn of the cinema, which was also the sunset.

You know, the morning star is also the sunset star: the first and last star to be seen.

But the story runs from the point of view of the scriptwriter.

And from there, from the tormented existence of a harassed man who never finished being recognized, he erects a monument that, in his own way, reproduces not only

but the very soul of the film '

'.

If it made cinema enter adulthood with the calculated deconstruction of classical language, '

'dares to raise a question before the viewer that seems more like a cry of, it has already been said, agony. In its own way, and to place us, the film once again puts on the screen the old disagreement over the authorship of the script that review

lead to paroxysm in his essay from the 70s'

'.

Very briefly, the question is to find out to whom the story of the industries and adventures of the devastated tycoon owes more despite the glory and anger at the indelible memory of his childhood.

Kael dedicated all his effort to highlighting the work of a Mankiewicz who, not in vain, was the one who knew personally

and his young lady (on which they are supposedly based).

And one step further, he came to accuse Welles

The war was later joined by John Houseman, Welles' own right hand, and Charles Higham.

In spite of everything, today there is consensus that the authorship was joint and thus it was clear in the

Until

entered the debate by stating each of the coincidences between the biography of Welles and his hero Kane: the two were orphaned at the same age and many of the characters in the film (Berstein, enchanted by Everett Sloane at the helm ) are doubles drawn from the director's own inner circle of friends, but beyond the controversy and noise, what counts is not so much giving a film history class but, and without the slightest modesty, making history.

And that's what Fincher applies to

The director places his protagonist in Mrs. Campbell's Guest Ranch, in the desert of Victorville miles from the temptations of Los Angeles, assisted by his secretary Rita Alexander and by Welles assistant John Houseman.

It is that away from everything and especially alcohol, our hero writes what he wants to be from the first second the definitive script capable of refounding an art and a universe if necessary.

From here, in a studied black and white signed by

near reverie or nightmare (dawn or dying), Fincher reformulates

from the opposite side of the mirror.

In a prodigious loop, the viewer is invited not so much to enter the

of the film that blew up the narrative codes of classic cinema and placed this strange art of shadows before a new abyss, which also, like to unweave and reweave the same story from the opposite point of view.

If Kane's was the story of the most powerful and arrogant of men faced with the power machinery of his own creation (like Saturn devouring himself before his children),

The film navigates between the past and its present without attending to any logic other than that imposed by the curiosity, or simple desire, of the viewer.

It is not exactly an inquiry like Thompson's in

that through the different testimonies seeks to find the ultimate meaning of the slippery riddle 'Rosebud'.

And from his ridiculous idealistic man, by force adrift and much of the time drunk (and so close to Don Quixote, one might add), he tries to find a clue that, in reality, is nothing short of nothing.

Pure vanity.

That lonely Oscar for the script (it was nominated in 9 categories) with which the Academy awarded '

',

Fincher does not deprive himself of anything.

And in its maze of specular references, the same cruel criticism that Welles directed in 1941 to the media in particular and to capitalism in general,

The struggle between the progressive Upton Sinclair (writer before politician) and the conservative Frank Merriam, supported by the

Hollywood in a more than tortuous way, it serves as a backdrop to describe one more defeat to add to all those accumulated by Mank.

It is the very idea of ​​representation that is being questioned.

We are, as always, on the terrain defined by Cervantes, which is cited time and again, in his Don Quixote.

that she herself behaves like a puzzle, a prodigious puzzle, that reconstructs the broken pieces of that strange mirror that for a long time was the cinema itself.

TO '

'he has the same doubt and the same feeling of guilty nostalgia as'

'by Tarantino, oa'

', by Almodóvar, or a'

', from Scorsese, or, rushing, to'

'by Cuarón.

All of them are wounded by the same agonizing fervor and

.

Every director has the right to

.

Even if it's on Netflix.

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