"Athena" and "Blonde"

I regret that I haven't seen any of Romain Gavras's previous films.  However, from everything I've read, "Athena" is a significant breakthrough for him.  It's a highly stylized, beautifully shot chronicle of three brothers, war hero Abdel (Dali Benssalah), angry agitator Karim (Sami Slimane)  and the self-interested Moktar (Ouassini Embare), who are caught up in a fictional social uprising that results from the on-camera death of their youngest brother at the hands of the French police.  The action centers on Athena, a banlieue, or housing development, largely inhabited by minorities and immigrants.  There's also a cop, Jérôme (Anthony Bajon), who is part of the police siege of Athena, and ends up a hostage of the rebels.   

You can draw parallels to the recent "Les Miserables," from "Athena" co-writer Ladj Ly, or to "La Haine," which addressed many of the same themes over twenty-five years ago.  However, the piece of media I couldn't stop comparing "Athena" to was Childish Gambino and Hiro Murai's "This is America" music video.  They're visually similar, sharing long tracking shots, a densely composed mise en scene featuring multiple planes of action, jarring onscreen violence, and ominous symbols like a background rider on a white horse.  However, what they really get across is this roiling, righteous anger of a dispossessed minority population directed against hostile law enforcement and the wider culture that supports them.  In "Athena" this anger has exploded into escalating riots and attacks, with an opening sequence that shows Karim leading a raid on a local police station, rendered in a stunning, eleven-minute long take.  

There's not much of a plot to "Athena" or any real grappling with the film's themes in any depth.  The film serves as an expression of raw grief and pain in the face of injustice and tragedy, raising far more questions than it has the capacity to answer.  I found the ending something of a cop-out, going for an ironic moment instead of something more substantive.  The characters are fairly thinly drawn, all trying to do the right thing according to their different outlooks on the situation, and all reluctantly pushed toward tragic outcomes.  However, the staging and the scale of the rioting is like nothing I've seen before.  Gavras goes for a high degree of stylization in the action, using fireworks and flares in night scenes, and having his rioters outfitted in bright colors.  The emphasis is on chaos over violence, on the wider sense of social disorder over any potentially cool moments of destruction.  The use of classical and choral music is haunting, giving the scenes of unrest an operatic quality.   

I wish that I had more context in order to adequately parse the film, but I am deeply impressed with and moved by the filmmaking of "Athena," and it's one of my favorites of the year so far. 

Now on to "Blonde," one of the most punishing films of the year.  This is a nearly three hour biopic of Marilyn Monroe that I'm tempted to call an anti-biopic for how it turns the usual conventions of the biopic formula against the audience.  Director Andrew Dominik paints Monroe's life as an endless struggle.  As a child, little Norma Jean Baker (Lily Fisher) has an unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson) who tries to kill her, and she ends up abandoned at an orphanage.  She grows up to become the beautiful Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, and enters the snake pit of Hollywood, where she is constantly exploited and abused.  Her love life is bumpy, including relationships with Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), but it's her tragic abortions and miscarriages that really wreak havoc on her fragile mental health.  

Based on the highly fictionalized account of Monroe's life in the Joyce Carol Oates novel "Blonde," the film version recontextualizes nearly all the memorable moments of Monroe's career with the behind-the-scenes glimpses of her ongoing degradation and pain.  Getting her big break comes as a direct result of a dehumanizing sexual encounter.  "The Seven Year Itch" is paired with the dissolution of her marriage to DiMaggio.  "Some Like it Hot" signals her spiraling health and drug addiction.  As for her rumored relationship with John F. Kennedy, that's here too - an excruciating, humiliating affair that feels like it's punishing the viewer for thinking that a tryst between the two could have been anything other than another trauma for Marilyn.  Her awful childhood isn't something she overcomes or makes peace with, but what proves to be her undoing in the bitter, bitter end.

"Blonde" looks absolutely gorgeous, thanks to Chayse Irvin's cinematography, but it frequently feels like a horror movie, and at nearly three hours in length, it's terribly wearing.  The dreamlike tone is similar to Pablo Larrain's recent "Jackie" and "Spencer," except that Marilyn is never the hero of her own story, but a perpetual victim.  I like De Armas as Marilyn Monro - she has the right physicality and allure - but it is such an infantilized, frequently shell-shocked version of her that I couldn't help but recoil.  I respect Andrew Dominick's impulse to show the troubled woman behind the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe, but the Marilyn in "Blonde" is hardly closer to the truth, now made into an avatar of suffering and abuse.  There's no complexity to her, the film falling back on the absence of her father as the root of her psychological turmoil, and it's disturbing how often she seems to regress into a little girl.

It does achieve moments of beauty, and I appreciate how uncomfortable and unflinching some of the performances are, but "Blonde" doesn't do right by Marilyn Monroe, and that's a fundamental flaw.

  

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