The brutalist: the birth of an exceptional filmmaker (critic)
Brady Corbet’s third film is a wild trip and accusing Fifties in America, following the experience of a freshly returned Jew immigrant.
How long had we not been to this point seized by the start of the film? To tell the truth the opening of The brutalist We still recalled the sound rumors, strident and explosive, of The area of interest. Or the sequence plan of Son of Saul. Two films which, in a way, deal with a common story, and explore inhumanity. Here it all starts with a monochrome credits whose very bauhaus typo Functionally and repetitively registers on the screen. Then comes the chaos. An infernal prologue which opens this monstrous work (in every sense of the word).
For a few minutes, we follow in a deafening industrial machinery noise, a silhouette. The man runs through a maze of pipes, bumps against people, escapes through passageways, in the middle of cries and a disturbing din. We do not know where we are. We will never really know it. Is it a camp? A city? A ghetto? A prison? This passage illustrates the excessive ambitions of the film – summarizing the Holocaust and the hero’s migration experience in a few minutes. And when the silhouette ends up seeing the day, accelerating its race, it is to end up on a ship in front of the statue of freedom. But it is seen from the point of view of the hero, groggy and leached, lying on the bridge. And who therefore sees the inverted statue, the head upside down. This is the symbol of what will follow.
Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, sad and lucid look, as impressive as in The pianist), was formerly an architect of genius in Budapest. He fled the war which has just finished and is now condemned to vegetate with his cousin owner of a furniture store in New York. A local magnate, responding to the very Wasp name of Van Buren (fantastic Guy Pearce, a funny mi 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 its cinematographer who uses 70 mm radically. Ample and majestic, this segment sets the foundations for the drama to come while telling 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 of this: the film then paints the portrait of the Megalo magnate and stages the cultural gap between naivety and “pseudo” American innocence and tragic , mercilessly auscultating the fifties anti -Semitism of the USA, one of the pillars of the country’s golden age. Toth gradually comes up against the Protestant High Bourgeoisie who sees this Jew very badly, weighted with the weight of the old European culture and who wants to impose new construction standards, take up more and more space in the community. And while we expected to see the quest and the 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 stages The battle between form and function, between beauty and horror, telling how the American Dream is in fact a nightmare machine that grips immigrants and spit their corpses to feed its soil.
Brady Corbet’s third film therefore marks the birth of an extraordinary filmmaker. We knew the actor a bit, crossed at Haneke, Von Trier and Östlund, less the director whose two previous films (The childhood of a chef And Vox Lux) had not been distributed in theaters. We discover here the madness of its visions, the power (sensual, sexual and metaphorical) of its staging, its virtuosity. Taking up certain lessons learned from his directors in scenes, he passes to the sieve of interiority the events and the American experience to make it a radical criticism. 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. Release on February 12, 2025
