Blonde has a trailer, a release date and a runtime
Andrew Dominik’s long-awaited Marilyn Monroe film Blonde finally has a trailer almost two years after Joyce Carol Oates, on whose book the film is based, saw a rough cut.
Not only has Netflix put out a trailer but they gave a release date (September 23), a runtime (166 minutes) and confirmed the US rating of NC-17 that Dominik talked up earlier this year.
The teaser trailer shows a weeping Marilyn (played by Cuban-American actress Ana de Armas) in front of a dressing table, being made up and praying ‘please come, don’t abandon me…’.
The make-up artist reassures her ‘she’s coming’ as a languid cover of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend plays over the top (a song popularised by Marilyn herself in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).
We’re also shown flashes of Monroe’s iconic dress-billowing in The Seven Year Itch, what appears to be a screening of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Marilyn both playing up for and being harassed by paparazzi.
Then we’re back to Marilyn at the dressing table. ‘She’s coming,’ she’s told again. ‘She’s almost here.’.
Slowly Marilyn then bursts into a playful giggle and smile.
Blonde, which Netflix financed to the tune of $22m, has been navigating some tricky waters — a long post-production has coincided with growing concerns on just how graphic Dominik’s vision is.
The book, which is a fictionalised look at Monroe’s life, pulls no punches with its depiction of sexual violence and, it seems, the near three-hour adaptation won’t either.
Dominik, who has admitted he was ‘surprised’ at the rating, said:
“It’s a demanding movie — it is what it is, it says what it says. And if the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem. It’s not running for public office.”
The Aussie filmmaker has frequently talked-up Blonde, calling it a masterpiece and comparing it to non other than Citizen Kane and Raging Bull. Asked to describe the film he said:
“The whole idea of Blonde was to detail a childhood drama and then show the way in which that drama splits the adults into a public and private self. And how the adult sees the world through the lens of that childhood drama, and it’s sort of a story of a person whose rational picture of the world as being overwhelmed by her unconscious, and it uses the iconography of Marilyn Monroe.”
As part of the film PR we were also given some new quotes from de Armas on how she and Dominik worked together to try and get inside Marilyn’s mind:
“I read Joyce’s novel, studied hundreds of photographs, videos, audio recordings, films — anything I could get my hands on. Every scene is inspired by an existing photograph. We’d pore over every detail in the photo and debate what was happening in it. The first question was always, ‘What was Norma Jeane feeling here?’ We wanted to tell the human side of her story. Fame is what made Marilyn the most visible person in the world, but it also made Norma the most invisible.”
Dominik said: “The film’s very much concerned with the relationship with herself and with this other persona, Marilyn, which is both her armour and the thing that is threatening to consume her.”
Blonde is out on September 23 and is expected to screen in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The score is by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis and it also stars Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne Nicholson.
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