Marilyn Monroe revisited in Cuban style in the film “Blonde”

The leader, Netflix puts online Wednesday, September 21 one of its biggest film projects of the year: Blonde, a biopic of Marilyn Monroe with rising star Ana de Armas in the skin of the film icon.

Despite the presence of the 34-year-old Cuban actress who however set the Lido on fire in early September during the presentation of the film at the Venice Film Festival. However, the film did not win any awards. The film is 2 hours and 45 minutes long and will lose some of its power on the small screen: like all Netflix products, it is not released in theaters and is available online for the 220 million subscribers of the platform.

JFK, president of the USA, with whom the actress had an affair shortly before his death, sixty years ago, falls from his pedestal. He is portrayed as a sexual predator in search of fresh flesh, in one of the strongest scenes of the film, where Marilyn is forced to perform oral sex on him while he is on the phone.

The scene is the image of the film, where Norma Jeane (her name in civil status) appears as a fragile woman, abused by the men in her life, including her ex-husbands, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) who beat her and the playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) who seems to despise her.

There is the intimate part, the film evokes the childhood broken by an abusive mother, the never resolved search for the father and an ambivalent desire for motherhood thwarted. At the risk of almost ignoring Marilyn’s relentlessness at work, or her iron will, which are more present in the fictional and documented biography of Joyce Carol Oates, from which the film is taken.

In any case, the Netflix film, Blonde, marks the birth of an actress, the Cuban Ana de Armas, on the rise since her arrival 15 years ago in the United States and who finds in this film the role of her life. “If we put aside the star, she was a woman like me, of the same age, also an actress in the industry” of cinema, said Ana de Armas in Venice.

“I had to look in places of myself that I knew were uncomfortable, dark and vulnerable, and that’s where I found the connection with this person” of Marilyn, added the actress, who worked for several months on her diction to erase her accent and get closer to the star’s.

During the shooting, “she was everything I thought about, everything I dreamed about, everything I could talk about, she was with me and it was beautiful. The concern for realism was pushed to the point of shooting in the very house where Norma Jeane grew up, before the orphanage, and in the one where her body was found. The film has no ambition to clarify the circumstances of her death.

“His ashes are everywhere in Los Angeles,” testified the director, Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) with Brad Pitt), who worked for ten years on the film, facing numerous rejections before Netflix agreed to open its wallet.

The film, with its virtuoso direction, alternating black and white and color, multiplies the allusions to many famous clichés to faithfully recreate the world of Marilyn Monroe. Added to this is an impeccable soundtrack, entrusted to rockers Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, close to the director, to whom he has already devoted documentaries.