Promising expectations, the first 5 minutes are sublime: claustrophobic like Son of Saul by László Nemes... with the Statue of Liberty lying horizontally, already revealing everything.

The story tells the fantastic tale of László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect who survived Auschwitz, addicted to opium. He lives his early years in poverty, initially taken in by a furniture maker, and meets a client who proposes a project for his father. Integrated into the wealthy environment of this family, he manages to bring his wife, who is in a wheelchair, accompanied by a nearly mute young woman.

The wealthy client, surrounded by politicians, financiers, and jurists from Philadelphia, offers him the project of a lifetime: the creation of a futuristic space, opening up the possibility of realizing the American dream.

However, László, who is not inclined to compromise, accepts and begins to work: amidst interruptions, trips to Italy to choose Carrara marble, project failures, and ups and downs.

Corbet's third film, his third time in Venice after winning the Best Director award in the Orizzonti section with his debut. Shot on 70mm film, it tells the story of 30 years in the life of this brilliant and visionary architect.

A 15-minute intermission inserted into the 215-minute screening seems like the director's true act of hubris, revealing the need to surprise: a confirmation, even with this film, this time to the nth degree, of the structural narcissistic obsession that accompanies him.

The ending, again, is as brutal as the brutalist architecture that accompanies the film.

An erudite, cultured journey, steeped in art, extraordinary music, that devours itself through the unstoppable, intrusive, and omnipresent presence of the director, always haunted by his own egotistical self-representation: the primal and structural need of a personality that must always be the center of attention, in this case, the screen, to celebrate and honor his own extraordinariness.

It's hard not to see him drowning in the reflective mirror of the image as he employs any technical trickery, albeit excellent, to enchant, manipulate, and surprise the viewer.

A well-structured yet unsophisticated trap that fails to impress without, however, eliciting emotion.

The sensational is the American director's obsessive pursuit, who cannot resist the twist.

And if the Statue of Liberty is horizontal because the American dream is simply a scam, a fraud, a spell for the naive, the brutalist is indeed Brady Corbet himself, with his astonishing, shocking cinematic elaborations, equally deceptive, fraudulent, and trickster-like.

Sensational!

02-Sep-2024 by Beatrice