The Cannes Film Festival has a stacked lineup this year, with new movies from David Cronenberg, James Gray, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook, Kelly Reichardt, and Hirokazu Kore-eda. One anticipated title that will not premiere at the festival, however, is Blonde, the Ana de Armas-starring Marilyn Monroe biopic from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik. Netflix won’t debut any of its films at the festival’s 75th edition, including Blonde.
Dominik didn’t directly discuss the Cannes omission during a recent interview with Collider (he hopes it premieres at Venice instead), but he did compare his “NC-17 movie about Marilyn Monroe” to two of the greatest movies ever. “Blonde is a movie for all the unloved children of the world. It’s like Citizen Kane and Raging Bull had a baby daughter,” he said, adding, “It uses all the imagery that you have seen of Marilyn Monroe, the films, photographs of her life. But it changes the meaning of all those things in accordance with her internal drama. So it’s sort of a movie about the unconscious.”
Dominik continued:
“And it’s a tragedy. It’s sort of like an unwanted child who becomes the most wanted woman in the world and has to deal with all of the desire that is directed at her, and how confusing that is. It’s kind of a nightmare. It’s about being in a car with no brakes. It’s just going faster and faster and faster.”
It’s only fair that de Armas stars in a movie that goes “faster and faster and faster” after her last film was about snails.
Blonde is expected to hit Netflix later this year.
(Via Collider)