“Blonde”, the icon of Marilyn Monroe at the center of an important film

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One of the most talked about films of the last Venice Film Festival is now available on Netflix: it is Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde”, a film focused on the life of one of the greatest icons in Hollywood history, Marilyn Monroe.

From her precarious childhood as Norma Jeane, to her rise, fame and sentimental intertwining, the film alternates reality and fiction, trying to explore the growing divide between her private and public identities, as if they belonged to two different people.

Based on the successful novel by Joyce Carol Oates, “Blonde” is a film that mixes the lights of the spotlights with the inner shadows experienced by the protagonist, through an alternation that the director makes so also through the staging.Dominik often changes format, passes from black and white to color with continuity, thus creating a film in search of an identity – just like the main character – and giving life to a great audiovisual symphonic score in which the splendid images dance with the equally wonderful music of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, two artists that the director himself had told in the documentaries “One More Time With Feeling” and “This Much I Know to Be True”. As he did in the beautiful “The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford” , Dominik destroys the icon of his protagonist to find her human essence, in a film that, not surprisingly, has a moment in the opening sequences in which the Hollywood hills are burning.

A film about cinema

This film is also a metaphor of cinema and, more generally, of the theme of gaze, which, in almost three hours of an extremely engaging narrative, investigates these aspects by focusing on how much the eyes of journalists, fans, admirers and detractors, as well as those of all of us viewers, have influenced Marilyn Monroe’s career for better or for worse.

Layered and complex, “Blonde” is a film that flies very high even risking some falls, but the result that arises is that of a work destined to remain etched in the eyes of those who have seen it for a long time. Great proof of the protagonist Ana de Armas in the most important role of his career to date.