Ana de Armas plays Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik's "Blonde".
The actress reveals unknown and tragic facets of the star's life.
She delivers a breathtaking performance in a film insisting more on Marilyn's private life than on her work.
It is indisputable: Ana de Armas is sublime in the role of the star who died prematurely in 1962 at the age of 36.
Blonde hair
by Andrew Dominic, available from Wednesday on Netflix, is especially worthwhile for the performance of its main actress.
She is totally believable in Marilyne and could even win an Oscar.
Whether she is glamorous like the icon who is familiar to the general public or lost like the solitary young woman she must have been in the intimacy, Ana de Armas, seen recently as a spy in the James Bond
Dying Can Wait
, convinces.
Our reservations come more from the way Andrew Dominik approaches his subject.
“How did an unwanted child deal with becoming the most wanted woman in the world?
Does that mean she had to cut herself in half?
“, he wonders in a note of intent of the catalog of the Venice Film Festival.
The director has chosen to show an object Marilyn, exploited and mistreated from her earliest childhood in a series of nightmarish scenes closer to a horror film than a classic biopic.
From color to black and white
In
Blonde
, we discover that Marilyn was martyred by her mother and then by the men in her life (including by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy who treats her like a piece of meat).
Passing from color to black and white according to the period documents from which he draws his inspiration, Andrew Dominik offers a virtuoso kaleidoscope without giving the spectator the slightest respite.
Raped from the beginning of her career, Marilyn suffered practically all her life, even during her marriages with baseball champion Joe DiMaggio (played by Bobby Cannavale) and author Arthur Miller (camped by Adrien Brody).
Love could not pull her out of the depression that engulfed her prematurely.
Andrew Dominik focuses on the horrors suffered by the young woman forced to have abortions several times.
These very harsh sequences are not always in exquisite taste when she talks to her fetus and we see the speculum entering her flesh in close-up.
One can get carried away in this morbid delirium or find that the demonstration, which starts from a good feeling, is struck with a jackhammer.
An iconic victim
In
Blonde
, Marilyn Monroe is not shown as a feminine ideal.
Andrew Dominik does not insist enough on his work.
He chooses to make her an emblematic victim of the patriarchy, which is ultimately another way of making her fit into a box, less conventional but ultimately just as reductive as considering her only as a sexual symbol.
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