Review of Blonde (2022) by Bertobellamy — 29 Sep 2022

Meaningless exploitation that only worries to portray Marilyn Monroe as a punching bag or a piece of meat for men to do whatever they want. It's clear that Andrew Dominik tried to make a film about how the cult of personality and the tyrannical Hollywood patriarchy ripped Marilyn apart, but 'Blonde' mistakenly fights exploitation with a deplorable and erratic tale that doesn't bother to explore another dimension of the character other than her suffering and humiliation.

Ana de Armas is fine, but his performance is borderline overacting, although this is Dominik's fault. It's easy to feel sorry for a character when shown being punched, raped, destroyed, and insulted from the first scenes to the last, but what's the point? There are no conventionalisms here; I give Dominik that, but his artistic pursuit has trampled all over the memory of not a movie star but a woman, and that is unforgivable to me.