Cinema: Marilyn Monroe, dead 60 years ago, featured at the Venice Film Festival

Sixty years after her death, she would not have told the whole truth yet. Marilyn Monroe is at the heart of the most anticipated film at the Venice Film Festival, “Blonde”, which traces the life and tragic end of a star crushed by the Hollywood machine.

Andrew Dominik’s film is presented in world premiere and in competition for the Golden Lion. Produced by Netflix, it will be posted on the platform on September 28, without going through the box of cinemas.

“Blonde” promises a feminist and romanticized rereading 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.

Her destiny has already inspired many creators, from Andy Warhol and his portraits to the film “My week with Marilyn” with Michelle Williams, ten years ago, passing through writers like Norman Mailer. “Blonde”, he promises to shed a harsh light on the patriarchal system of Hollywood, without claiming to clear up 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.

It is Ana de Armas, a 34-year-old Cuban rising star spotted in particular as a James Bond girl in “Dying Can Wait” and as a nurse in the mystery film “Knives Out”, who takes up the challenge of embodying the biggest star. of film history. This role, for which she had to face criticism related to her Spanish accent, could propel her into a new category.

Reconstruct, sometimes with the help of archive photos, legendary sequences of the 7th art, such as Marilyn’s interpretation of “Diamond’s are a girl best friend”, the flagship title of the comedy “Men prefer blondes”, is not the least of the challenges to which this biopic is measured.

Beyond the glamor and glitz, the director of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007), of which it is the first fiction film for a decade, promises to plunge the spectators into the psyche of Marilyn, since 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 -ultimate symbol.

“Blonde” is “a critique 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.

The film is one of Netflix’s most ambitious cinematic projects, a service with 220 million subscribers worldwide engaged with major studios and other streaming services in a race to produce new content.

Venice has become a place of choice for the platform, which presented there in 2018 “Roma”, by Alfonso Cuaron, Oscar winner then, just like last year “The Power of Dog” by Jane Campion, also Oscar winner.

‘Blonde’ was unable to premiere at Cannes as Netflix films weren’t released in French theaters with no access to the race for the Palme d’Or.