It is already somewhat forgotten, but ‘Blonde’ was highly commented when it premiered in Netflix, there are both great defenders of the film and people who hated it with all their hearts. Now Andrew Dominicscreenwriter and director of the same, has assured that “I’m so glad that it has outraged so many people.“.
“Criticism only hurts if you agree with it.”
The director has made those incendiary statements while passing through the Red Sea Festival in Saudi Arabia. There she has made it clear that “there’s a long history that directors’ dream projects are bad movies; critics in the United States would say that about Blonde. But they are wrong!“, further noting the following about its critical reception:
Criticism only hurts if you agree with it, and the truth is that I didn’t agree with any of it. I was hoping for a critical success and for no one to see the movie; ‘Blonde’ was the complete opposite. In America they hated the movie. They were angry, outraged by the movie, but a lot of people saw it. I was a bit surprised.
The also director of ‘Kill them gently’ recalled that “I am Australian, from Melbourne; I reached the age of 80, when offending your public was a solemn duty. The movie business has become less and less like that; the movie business and society in general have taken great care not to offend people“, noting this about the current cultural situation:
We now live in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see, and if they’re not shown that, it annoys them.
Which is kind of weird, because she’s dead. The movie makes no difference one way or the other. What they really mean is that the movie exploited her memory of her, her image of her, which is fair enough.
But that’s the idea of the movie. It’s about taking the iconography of your life and putting it at the service of something else, it’s about taking things you’re familiar with and turning the meaning around. But that’s what they don’t want to see.
Come on, Dominik, who at the time directly rejected the anti-abortion reading of the film, he even seems to have enjoyed the overdose of beatings that ‘Blonde’ has received, since he considers that Hollywood cinema is increasingly “more conservative“and that he doesn’t want to make films that in their own way function as bedtime stories. Of course, let’s not forget that it really was a failure for Netflix in terms of viewings, because more was expected of her…
In Espinof: