The Brutalist: Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody explode American mythology in a powerful fresco

The film presented in Venice is an epic and wild descent into the experience of a Jewish immigrant who has recently arrived in the United States.

As soon as the credits end The Brutalistthe Venetian festival-goers knew that something had just happened. After several days of scouring the halls of the Lido in search of freshness (and authors too), a film finally came to crush everything. The superlatives of the press once the lights were back on (“fascinating”, “captivating”, “epic”, “audacious”) spoke volumes about the power of the project. And its ambition. Because with this film, Brady Corbet intends to explore the roots (ethical, aesthetic and moral) of contemporary America, and to denounce the anti-Semitism and crazy capitalism that have been eating away at the foundations of the country since the 1950s.

Third film by a young filmmaker (Corbet is 35 years old), The Brutalist announces the color from the beginning. Three hours thirty-five, a prologue, an intermission that separates two equally terrifying parts… We hesitate between the mad vanity of an unconscious director or the genius draped on the contrary in pure self-consciousness. The Vistavision logo (and the 70 mm projection), the crazy credits (monochrome, functional and repetitive) as well as the infernal prologue open a behemoth work and suggest that this film will be unlike anything we have seen so far.

The story is that of a Hungarian Jewish architect, a survivor of the camps, who arrives in the United States after the war. This is the meaning of the impressive opening that lasts a few minutes and follows in a deafening noise of industrial machinery a silhouette. The indiscernible shadow runs through a maze of pipes, bumps into people, escapes through corridors, in the middle of screams and a disturbing din. It is impossible, in front of this introductory scene, not to think of the beginning of The Area of ​​Interest for its stopping power and its willingness to disorient the viewer.

In fact, we don't really know where we are. Is it a camp? A city? A ghetto? A prison? Or is it simply a metaphor for the war years and the final solution? In any case, at the end, the man sees daylight, speeds up his run and finds himself on the deck of a ship in front of the Statue of Liberty. But, seen from the hero's point of view, groggy and exhausted, the statue is shown in an inverted, crooked view, a symbol of everything that will follow.

Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, as brilliant and impressive as in The pianist), once a brilliant architect in Budapest, is now condemned to vegetate at his cousin's house in Philadelphia. A local tycoon, with the very WASP name of Van Buren (fantastic Guy Pearce, half-joking half-disturbing at first), will give him a chance and hire him to build an extraordinary project. This is broadly the plot of the first part of the film, entitled “Enigma of Arrival”. Abducted, galloping at the speed of a Chrysler Falcon, this first chapter highlights Corbet's extraordinary virtuosity and the talent of his cinematographer who uses the 70 mm in a radical way. Ample, clear and quite fascinating, this segment lays the foundations for the drama to come while recounting the traditional adventure of the American immigrant. Down and rise…

The second chapter (after a 15-minute intermission) destroys all that: the film then paints the portrait of a new Citizen Kane (Van Buren), depicts the cultural gap that opposes American naivety and “pseudo” innocence to European tragedy, and mercilessly examines fifties anti-Semitism, considered here as one of the pillars of the Yankee golden age. Because Toth will clash with the Protestant upper middle class who view with a very bad eye this Jew, burdened by the weight of the old European culture, taking up more and more space in the community. The elites refuse to let his existential burden be imposed on them (the scene on the choice between concrete and marble for the monument is exceptional).

We thought we were going to see the quest for a total and sublime work of art, this second act becomes stifling, heavy and sticky (in every sense of the word). Entitled “The Hardcore of Beauty”, this chapter also sees Lazslo's wife, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones) join him with their niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). The two women hate their new environment and refuse the liberalism and freedom that their new “masters” grant them. Things will take a dark and dramatic turn because behind all this, what Corbet is staging is the savagery that feeds triumphant capitalism (suggesting that the “Brutalist” of the title is not just a reference to an artistic movement, and is not necessarily the one we think).

The Brutalist is Brady Corbet's third film. We know a little about the actor, seen in Haneke, Von Trier, Östlund or Mia Hansen-Løve, but less about the filmmaker whose two previous films were not distributed in theaters in France. Here we discover the madness of his visions, the power (sensual, sexual and metaphorical) of his staging, his formal virtuosity. Taking up certain lessons learned from his directors (we sometimes think of Haneke or Von Trier) Corbet also draws inspiration from the great formalists. There is something of PT Anderson in him in this way of making the American adventure a tragic and theatrical story, insane and outrageous. In this way of passing through the sieve of interiority, the events and the US experience to make an explosive critique of them.

The Brutalist received the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 81st Venice Film Festival:

Venice Film Festival rewards Pedro Almodovar and two French actors