The mysterious Blonde haira free variation on the persona of Marilyn Monroe, crowned with a reputation as a monstrous and sulphurous work, was undoubtedly the most awaited object of this 79e Venice Film Festival and the last of the four Netflix-labeled films presented in competition. After White Noiseby Noah Baumbach, and bardoby Alejandro G. Iñarritu, a certain trend is beginning to emerge from the prestigious house productions in front of which the Lido has laid out the red carpet: a blank check aesthetic for super-authors giving free rein to their creativity, resulting in brain-films filled to the brim. Blonde hair does not deny this propensity for emphasis, even if, in his case, the thing may initially seem more intimately justified.
Without any biographical vocation, the film advances under the aegis of the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1999 (republished by Le Livre de poche, 2002), drawing from it its above all psychic substance, its fragmented structure and the distance authorized by the writing with the “real facts”, usually fetishized by Hollywood fiction. It is therefore not a question of retracing Marilyn Monroe’s “real life” through the menu, but of engulfing oneself in the psyche of the star as during a long wandering which would gradually turn into a nightmare.
Oedipal maze
Like the novel, Dominik goes back in the first place to the childhood of the actress, struggling with a psychotic mother, a former cameo starlet in a straight line towards the asylum, and in the glaring absence of an unknown father. , whose empty space is filled with a photo. He then examines how the young Norma Jean (her first name in the city) gradually becomes Marilyn, first a pin-up collecting magazine covers, a beginner running to producers’ pharmacies for small roles obtained at the cost of rape, dazzling sex-symbol caught in the cage of false reflections offered to him by industry, in short a broken angel, vanquished by the defilement of the dream factory, sinking into a hell of barbiturates and anguish.
The main operation of Blonde hair consists in plunging his heroine, played to the point of possession by the Cuban-born actress Ana de Armas, into a veritable Oedipal maze, each detour of which relates to the disturbing figures of the mother and the father, as well as to the various fetishes of childhood (a stuffed animal or the drawer that served as a cradle).
By making filiation the crux of the trauma (the same goes for the baby she will never have), Dominik too easily reduces the figure of Marilyn to the basic Freudian schema (the men he meets on his path are fathers abusive), brandished as the source of all his torments. This is obviously not enough to circumvent the complexity of the character, nor to exhaust all its dimensions. Bidding on psychoanalysis, the film digs a reason for dissociation towards the star: between Norma Jean and Marilyn, a chasm remains gaping, a vortex which sucks her in entirely.
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