What We Know About Netflix's Marilyn Monroe Project, Blonde
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The first trailer for Netflix's Marilyn Monroe project, Blonde, has just been released. Starring Ana de Armas, the movie has been attracting buzz in Hollywood for well over a year, thanks to its unusual and "disturbing" perspective on the life of the iconic actress.
Director Andrew Dominik has called Blonde the story of "how a childhood trauma shapes an adult who’s split between a public and a private self." Based on the historical fiction novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, the film is a fictitious retelling of Marilyn Monroe's life, which focuses on her psychology, the growing divide between her public and private personas, and ultimately the question of what led her to die by suicide.
Blonde will premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival this week, and will then be available to watch on Netflix from September 28. The stacked supporting cast of the movie includes Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Evan Williams and Julianne Nicholson.
One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of Blonde is its rating—back in March, the Motion Picture Association gave the film a rare NC-17, the highest rating available. The MPAA said that "some sexual content" was the reason, but it didn't elaborate on specifics. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Blonde is the first original Netflix film ever to receive an NC-17.
Director Andrew Dominik admitted that he was surprised by the extreme rating. "I thought we'd colored inside the lines," he told Vulture. "It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world." Later in the same interview, Dominik added that there's "something in [the film] to offend everyone."
More recently, De Armas spoke out against the much-discussed NC-17 rating. “I didn’t understand why that happened,” de Armas told L’Officiel, per Uproxx. “I can tell you a number of shows or movies that are way more explicit with a lot more sexual content than Blonde. But to tell this story, it is important to show all these moments in Marilyn’s life that made her end up the way that she did. It needed to be explained. Everyone [in the cast] knew we had to go to uncomfortable places. I wasn’t the only one.”
According to Screen Daily, Netflix insisted on bringing in a renowned female editor, Jennifer Lame, to "curb the excesses of the movie, which reportedly includes a rape scene taken directly from the novel. Oates, for her part, has called the film "startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation."
De Armas has also spoken at length about the intensive process she went through to transform herself into Marilyn. “It was about observing her facial expressions, her mouth, the roundedness of her lips, how she showed her lower teeth, and why the ‘o’s were like that,” the actress told The LA Times. “Someone’s voice is more than just a specific accent. It says so much about a person.”
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