Ana de Armas: “Playing Marilyn pushed me into very dark places”

However, ‘Blonde’ promises to provoke the same dissension on which Joyce Carol Oates’ book of the same name was once based. Both Oates’s and Dominik’s works are works of fiction and powerful imaginations that occasionally change and occasionally invent the real life of the actress and icon in search of a spiritual and symbolic truth about her. Those most critical of Oates’ text Using assumptions and lies to expose Monroe to the kind of exploitation she accuses others ofand the same kind of arguments can be made against the film.

The woman occupying the center of ‘Blonde’ is in any case more than a victim. Yes, she is summed up as a woman trapped in a body shaped by other people’s fantasies, repeatedly tortured by greedy men. But above all, the film is determined to give him the respect and recognition that has historically been denied him. This purpose serves to contextualize the most striking fabrications his images contain, and in large part explains why. Officially classified as an “adults only” movie in the United States.: in one of his scenes, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy forces Marilyn to give him a blowjob -and portrayed as a monstrous being-; other, producer Darryl F. Zanuck raped her in his officeand seeing them is hard not to think about the stories the victims told. Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood bosses It has been announced to the public since 2017.

For the rest, the film runs through a succession of well-known biographical episodes, starting with a childhood marked by the mental illness of the mother and the absence of that father Monroe will never know. Blonde’ lived obsessively – and it passes Marriages with Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller and films like ‘The Fog in the Soul’ (1952), ‘The temptation can be up’ (1955) or ‘Skirt and Crazy’ (1959); and on the way, a narrative that tries to break with linearity from the start – and constantly changes color both with black and white and with different screen resolutions, increasingly permeates the realm of impressionism, as does the actress. He was swallowed by the icon and increased his addiction to barbiturates. “The movie is the story of Norma Jeane but little by little Marilyn takes over the story; The two characters feed off each other, they need each other”, De Armas explained to the press today. “It required a very difficult immersion process to interpret them. It pushed me into very dark places, but that’s where I found the connection to him, his pain and his trauma.”.

Meanwhile, Dominik transforms the sequence of scenes into a compilation of all the iconography Marilyn has produced through her photoshoots and the most famous moments of her films, where they become indicators of abuse and objectification that are no longer synonymous with glamor and lust. . “Through ‘Blonde’, I learned to feel more empathy for actors and actresses who are under the pressure of the media and social networks to stop being who they are and stop being who others want them to be,” De Weapons says. “And I’ve learned to protect myself from that pressure.”

After all, the backbone of ‘Blonde’ is exactly that. The disconnect between the myth of the sexual goddess created by Hollywood -peroxide, false eyelashes, tight dresses and rocking stilettos- and the woman trying to survive by being crushed by it, disgust with own sexuality, at war with a body that gave it no children, and yes repeatedly abortions. Popular culture has always known that person, but has long turned their back on him because otherwise it would have meant facing his own misery. Seeing the light of day like this for a movie like ‘Blonde’ means it’s going to get harder and harder for her to do that.