Venice film festival: Andrew Dominik’s controversial drama finds space for talking foetuses, presidential sex and a starry throuple – but denies its subject sufficient agency
Clocking in at nearly three hours, this phantasmal riff on the life of movie star Marilyn Monroe will do for people with bad backs what its inspiration, Joyce Carol Oates’ 738-page novel, did for fragile wrists. By turns ravishing, moving and intensely irritating, Blonde is, by the end, all a bit much – in every sense.
Writer-director Andrew Dominik (best known for macho yarns such as Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has forged Monroe’s story into Wagnerian-scale opera, except there’s no singing – apart from the bit where Monroe (Ana de Armas) rasps out Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. At least there’s a lush score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to take up the musical slack, synth-forward and full of plaintive anxiety in the key changes, one that tempers and harmonises the histrionic emotional register.
