![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is a fictionalization of a fictionalization that is wild with visual experimentation, fluttering between aspect ratios, flinging from serenely wrought black-and-white cinematography to pastel-sweet color a sensory experience meant to enrapture. Dominik’s Blonde both inherits and builds upon these considerations. Over the 60 years since her death, Monroe’s history has become a vehicle for investigations into mid-century Americana, female sexuality and female madness, the cruelty of the Hollywood dream factory. “That’s my true name.” For Dominik and de Armas and so many other storytellers - including Fred Lawrence Guiles, whose 1967 serialized biography, “Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe,” popularized the idea that Norma and Marilyn were two opposing sides of one woman - Monroe isn’t a human with interiority, so much as a myth to be peeled apart. “You could call me Norma,” she says to Miller, breathier with every syllable. Here, the dynamics that define de Armas’s performance are in the spotlight: sherbet-soft eyes incessantly blinking an airy, alluring voice body language that prioritizes the expression of beauty rather than any emotional truth. Monroe travels from timid to hurt to elated, always so eager for the approval and love of the men in her orbit. He’s annoyed before being shocked by her perceptiveness she recognizes that Magda struggles with English and was only pretending to read a poem he thought she loved. In the next scene, de Armas’s Marilyn trepidatiously shares her ideas with Miller about Magda, referencing Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and probing the idealized memory he’s put on the page. It’s not that she doesn’t speak so much as what she says doesn’t matter as much as what she endures. In Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s faithful film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s hothouse Gothic novel, that casts Adrien Brody as the presumptuous yet softly rendered Miller and Ana de Armas as the immobilized Monroe, the actress must have no voice, either. “Actress must have no mouth,” Monroe once wrote about the industry in a diaristic poem, collected in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. We don’t get to see her performance or regard the skill that ends up moving Miller to tears himself. Monroe’s mouth pops open, but she’s stopped from speaking by freeze frame. “Not my Magda,” Miller says definitively, referring to his first and unconsummated love, on whom a character in his play is based. Tears dangle from her lash line like diamonds in suspended animation. ![]() Her gaze darts between the script pages shaking in her hands and the reactions glinting across Miller’s face. His physicality has all the respect of an eye roll. The camera tracks closer and closer to their faces with each cut. The scene cuts between Miller at the back of the audience, presumably at the studio to cast his next play, and Monroe in the center of that stage, there to train. “Oh, he’s in love with her,” he says, nodding to the director and studio founder Elia Kazan, seen only from behind cradling a cigarette between his fingers. She’s in a black dress, legs crossed and a coat slung over her shoulders, her face fixed in a terrified expression. Marilyn Monroe sits on a shadowy stage in front of him, about to perform, flanked on each side by other actors in a half-circle. Arthur Miller enters the Actors Studio, drawing its crowd into a reverent silence. ![]()
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