Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist is not lacking in ambition. What’s more, beyond the attempt to touch the masterly, to deliver a “monumental” work as some commercials like to call it, the film has a singular element. For an American film in competition at Venice 2024, we can’t help but appreciate the initiative. All the more so as it seems difficult to label the film as a fashionable object, netflixian or amazonian for example, as we’ve seen in recent years, produced by filmmakers who don’t know how to pause certain interesting initial formal ideas that quickly take over everything else to the point of crushing their subject themselves (Blonde for example). The brutalist‘s broad narrative ambition (a man, a family, a destiny, an era, a country, a society, an art form), its long running time – rather rare in American cinema, apart from Beatty and Lumet, and to a lesser extent Scorcese and P.T. Anderson – and its decadent, traumatic themes are all reminiscent of Visconti. We perceive in it, at the very least, a distant cousin. Is that enough to make it a great film?
In terms of form, the story spans several decades, with a few excerpts offered between two bursts of acceleration, two eclipses – Corbet chooses to linger on periods or even moments in a lifetime, then, at the end of these, transposes us, without a moment’s hesitation, Star Trek-style, into a new space-time bubble. The common thread? A pharaonic work, of the kind that can never be finished, as can a film that is too ambitious, a film that tackles a subject that is too big or unassailable. The metaphor applies in particular to what the film will eventually reveal, with Brady Corbet perhaps recalling fond memories of his acting debut (Gregg Araki‘s highly singular, magnificent and hardcore Mysterious Skin).
The brutalist , in terms of form, impresses with a number of fine qualities. First and foremost, we’d like to highlight the outstanding work done on the film’s sound and music, which never ceases to sublimate the images, translating perceptions rather than underlining them, all in an overtly avant-garde atmosphere, a sort of electrified acid jazz enhanced by hyper-fast beats. The work on the image also stands out, whether it’s the search for a Kodak photograph (70 mm), or the work on blurs, again to evoke disturbed perceptions, moments of cerebral wandering. We’re also thinking of a few plastic sequences, transitions with a temporal acceleration value, based on photocollages enhanced with sounds and music that announce the changes that the passage of time allows, when they don’t directly evoke the theme to which the film will relate.
Ambitious, singular, with a few excellent ideas, and even a bit of attitude, the die should have been cast and our minds totally won over. But for that to happen, and without getting into the debate about biographical credibility that has been raging among architects, the story and its subject matter would have had to be much more compelling and engaging, and not stray into the endless American Dream. Here, the fairy tale is very often present, even at the supposed worst moments – the magic of cinema, but at what price! The film’s pace and duration should have corresponded to what it really had to tell us. The 3 hours or so it took were probably worth 2, without the slowness being incriminating, insofar as it introduces an interesting element of mystery, and tends to thicken the plots and ordeals, making them more truthful. Above all, our attention should have been fully captured by the writing, which in many respects resembles that of a series, which certainly allows itself time to deepen its characters, but which also allows itself “pleasure” pauses, narrative redundancies, futile insinuations that a more cinematographic style would chase away, in a dual logic of purity and efficiency. Paradoxically, The Brutalist’s attempt to keep the viewer awake with side-splitting moments, and to rouse him or her even more by offering sudden reversals, leads to a kind of weariness through overkill.
Brady Corbet certainly has a bright future ahead of him as a filmmaker, and The Brutalist is certainly a promising work, well worth the detour, but if we were evoking a distant cousinhood with Visconti, Lumet or Beatty, we’ve just determined its main limit.
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