Not only was his professional life a source of conflicting feelings, so was the star's private life Reeves ended his extramarital affair with ex-showgirl Toni Mannix in 1958 and announced his engagement to socialite Leonore Lemmon. Where, in all this, is the woman who once astutely observed, “Men do not see me.This led to Reeves becoming frustrated and dissatisfied with his career trajectory and the one-dimensional role, though he was ultimately given a salary raise and remained with the series. Her comment leads to an emotional breakthrough for Miller in the scene, but as directed by Dominik, it lands like the unsophisticated truth-telling of a child. We see a hint, again, of her intelligence in an exchange with the playwright Arthur Miller (played by Adrien Brody) when she makes a seemingly throwaway observation about a character he has written. There’s a hint here - barely - of the woman who, when asked in an interview what she wears in bed, archly said, “Why, Chanel No. “Isn’t it delicious?” she says - a line from the scene she has just shot, but also, perhaps, a reference to the adoration of her screaming fans. We see Monroe here, staying put on the grate even after filming has stopped because she knows she’s a star giving her public what they want. This particular sequence is also significant because it underlines how little interest the film has in depicting Monroe as a person with intelligence and agency, who consciously made certain choices to be seen as the “Aphrodite of the 20th century”, as Dominik describes her in an interview. We see the faces of the men in the crowd around her, all whooping and whistling, a parody of lust in what could have been a powerful commentary on the objectification of women’s bodies. This depicts the shooting of the infamous skirt-over-grate scene from The Seven Year Itch, with the camera zooming in from every angle as Monroe’s dress flies up around her in an over-three-minute long sequence. Troubling also are the film’s depictions of sexual assault, which have received considerable backlash but ironically, the sequence which most blurs the line between empathy for Monroe and exploitation of her tragedy via de Armas’s body is the one that is most overtly designed to win us over to the film’s view of itself as essentially sympathetic. It features a powerhouse performance by Cuban actor Ana de Armas as Monroe, a haunting background score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and visual sleights-of-hand by Dominik that deliver the occasional well-timed gut punch, such as in the scene where Norma sits before a vanity mirror, as her makeup man works on her face, desperately praying to Marilyn to “come” and not “abandon” her. Based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie is positioned as a biopic (despite being, in fact, a heavily fictionalised account of Monroe’s life), and takes us from her traumatic childhood as Norma Jeane, the daughter of an abusive single mother with mental health problems, to her painful early career as an ingenue among the wolves of Hollywood and her final years as a troubled star in search of some artistic, but mostly romantic, validation. In its artistry, ambition and intention - as articulated by its director Andrew Dominik - the recent Netflix film Blonde is very different from the tattered paperback I read 20 years ago in a Calangute beach shack.
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