The young Norma Jeane is played by 12-year-old Lily Fisher, who Dominik directs like a silent-era child star she cries with the heart-rending directness of Jackie Coogan in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. Blonde takes a similar approach, smashing Monroe’s life story into fragments, each one cold and sparkling, and jagged enough to draw blood. Perhaps it’s closest in form to I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s 2007 Bob Dylan film, which offered six vying perspectives on its famously elusive subject. But Dominik, the Australian director of Killing them Softly and The Assassination of Jesse James, is no idle provocateur, and the shots in question – during two gruelling abortion scenes – feed into the film’s central idea of Monroe as a vessel to be filled up or scraped out as her audience demanded.īlonde isn’t an Elvis, or even a Spencer – Pablo Larraín’s proudly apocryphal Diana drama, which caused a similar stir on the Lido last year. Just how unsparing is it? Well, the birth canal talk turned out to be accurate.
So when rumours spread on the Lido earlier this month that the film contained not one but two shots in which the camera peers directly out of Monroe’s birth canal, no one was especially taken aback. And punchy talk from Dominik in interviews – “if the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the f-ing audience’s problem,” he told a reporter – seemed only to confirm that festival-goers were in for a pummelling. The casting of the Cuban-American actress Ana de Armas had raised some eyebrows, particularly when the trailer confirmed she would be using her natural accent. Back in January, this decade-in-the-making adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel had been certified NC-17 by America’s Motion Picture Association – a rating reserved for the irredeemably graphic and ghoulish. No screening at Venice this year had been the subject of more fevered speculation than Andrew Dominik’s experimental Marilyn Monroe biopic.
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