The Brutalist on Canal Plus: the birth of an exceptional filmmaker (review)

Brady Corbet’s third film is a wild and accusatory trip through fifties America, following the experience of a Jewish immigrant freshly returned from the camps.

It’s one of the great cinema sensations of recent years. An independent film produced for $10 million, The Brutalist dazzled the 2024 Venice Film Festival (Silver Lion), before winning three Oscars (including best actor for Adrien Brody) and attracting nearly 500,000 spectators to French theaters. Not bad for a 3.5 hour drama about a Jewish architect who survived the camps. A monumental work to (re)see this Tuesday evening on Canal Plus, and streaming on MyCanal.

How long has it been since we were so captivated by the beginning of a film? In fact, the opening of The Brutalist still reminded us of the loud, strident and explosive rumors of The Zone of Interest. Or the Son of Saul sequence shot. Two films which, in a way, deal with a common history, and explore inhumanity. Here it all begins with a monochrome credits whose very Bauhaus typography is written on the screen in a functional and repetitive way. Then comes chaos. An infernal prologue which opens this monstrous work (in every sense of the word).

For a few minutes, we follow a silhouette amid the deafening noise of industrial machinery. The man runs through a maze of pipes, bumps into people, escapes through passageways, amid screams and a disturbing noise. We don’t know where we are. We’ll never really know. Is this a camp? a city? a ghetto? a prison? This passage illustrates the film’s excessive ambitions – to summarize the Holocaust and the hero’s migratory experience in a few minutes. And when the silhouette finally sees the day, accelerates its course, it is to find itself on a ship in front of the Statue of Liberty. But this is seen from the point of view of the hero, groggy and exhausted, lying on the bridge. And who therefore sees the inverted statue, the head upside down. It is the symbol of what will follow.

Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, sad and lucid look, as impressive as in The Pianist), was once a genius architect in Budapest. He fled the war which has just ended and is now condemned to vegetating with his cousin who owns a furniture store in New York. A local tycoon, with the very WASP name of Van Buren (fantastic Guy Pearce, half funny, half worrying), will give him a chance and hire him to build an extraordinary project. Entitled “Enigma of Arrival”, this first chapter highlights the extraordinary virtuosity of Corbet and the talent of his cinematographer who uses 70 mm in a radical way. Ample and majestic, this segment lays the foundations for the drama to come while recounting the traditional adventure of the American immigrant. From the gutter to the top.

The second chapter (after a 15-minute intermission) will work to destroy all this: the film then paints the portrait of the megalomaniac tycoon and highlights the cultural gap which opposes American naivety and “pseudo” innocence to European tragedy, mercilessly examining fifties anti-Semitism in the USA, one of the pillars of the country’s golden age. Toth gradually comes up against the Protestant upper bourgeoisie who take a very dim view of this Jew, weighed down by the weight of old European culture and who wants to impose new standards of construction, to take more and more place in the community. And while we expected to see the quest and construction of a total and sublime work of art (the chapter is entitled “The Hardcore of Beauty”), this part crushes the foundations of the American dream depicts the battle between form and function, between beauty and horror, telling how the American Dream is in fact a nightmarish machine which crushes immigrants and spits out their corpses to nourish its soil.

Brady Corbet’s third film therefore marks the birth of an extraordinary filmmaker. We knew the actor a little, having crossed paths with Haneke, Von Trier and Östlund, less the director whose two previous films (Childhood of a Chef and Vox Lux) had not been distributed in theaters. Here we discover the madness of his visions, the power (sensual, sexual and metaphorical) of his staging, his virtuosity. Taking up certain lessons learned from his directors, he sifts through the interiority of events and the American experience to create a radical critique. This architect seems to want to destroy everything to better rebuild the great US cinema…

Of Brady Corbet With Adrian Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce… Duration 3h34.