10/4/22 - Blonde (2022) - 4/10

I disliked this film experience. It’s crowded with poor and unintelligible stylistic choices, a schizophrenic narrative, a detachment from reality and only a light grip with significant engagement…all un-enviably piled on top of being extremely too long. Harshly cartooney as it dances around its slick shot moments to weave a tapestry of disdain and depression; for progenitor, protagonist, and participant.

It feebly throws A LOT at the screen, some of it working in spurts, but equating to an uneasy alliance of disparate puzzle pieces. The score is at 6s and 7s. The metaphors and hints are slap-dashly overt.

Mothers, talking aborted babies, meat and lots of DADDIES. The bulk of the film is borderline distasteful and an unabridged depressing affair with an incessant daddy issue crutch.

There is rarely a clear evaluation of psyche or a coherent placement of person/time/events. Is this supposed to be a stream of consciousness dark fairytale divorced from lucid story structure - lost in an ambling array of airy audacities and ontological odysseys?

I cannot deny Anna De Armas’ effort, ability or achievement. She devotes herself here, body and soul, only to be surrounded by messy and miscalculation. It’s an escape into fantasy but it is a troubling and vulgar one. Or depiction of one. Her performance is powerful and evocative but vacant of a living breathing human presence. She pushes but is giving a mirror image of the idea of MM, which this film appears to bring into question. It seems to consider her talentless meat to be exploited. Denigrates her work, at once in the verisimilitude of the film but also in a sick display of her and her brokenness.

Vulgar, vitiate, victim, vulva shot. Perhaps it’s just meant to make you uncomfortable and downtrodden. It can be an effective film, nailing its aims, while still being an off putting and unenjoyable cacophony. Just because I didn’t enjoy the spectacle and the pomp (too much!), doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t work for someone else. But for me, this was an ethereally breathy exhale possibly lost in a glaring blaring extravagance. I suppose it is a success at being a failure.

Ps: A new entry on the most uncomfortable bj scenes along with Killer Joe, Requiem for a Dream, and Brown Bunny.