Pairing Beauty With The Ups And Downs Of An Artist’s Life
To continue with architectural terms, The Brutalist, an epic drama Brady Corbet co-wrote with his wife, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold, is simply palatial. Wide in scope but also very intimate, it has perfection in it. From costume and production design, editing, score, cinematography, casting and performances, screenplay, all is curated, gorgeous multilayered craft. An excellent cast works perfectly together. The unforgettable, touching performance by Adrien Brody should have deserved best actor prize in Venice, but went unnoticed.
Brody together with Guy Pierce, Alessandro Nivola and Felicity Jones are simply perfect and provide stellar acting. A24, who has bought the movie, will get many satisfactions from it, and so do we as viewers. And so will the great producer Kaplan Morrison who left Brady completely free in his “Architecture is life in its construction.” From this sentence at the beginning of the FIPRESCI and Silver Lion Prize Winner, one is immediately kidnapped by its strong truth. Art. Beauty. Life. And the difficulties of ‘building’ a carrier through artistic vision is the main ‘draft’, the ‘sketch’ on which Brody Corbet set this amazing film /project. Three hours and a half for a movie on craftsmanship, knowledge, sensitivity of being an artist. Most of the time built with a price in suffering and a difficult past.
At the end The Brutalist is great art expressed through a movie explaining what it implies to be an artist. No matter if this art is going to be cinema, painting, sculpture, dancing, singing or strictly the form of brutalist architecture the film deals with. The highlighting idea underneath the movie is the inner conscience of it. If you are a genuine artist, you normally have no money. To attract money, you need to have to have a patron. The patron normally has no art. That’s why he calls you. But when the artist proposes his ideas, patrons always want to say something, altering, blocking, ruining the artist’s initial project. This can happen between editors and writers. Among painters and collectors/gallerists. Even with filmmakers and producers. The reality is always the same!
Culture against any form of money power, is often not paired with elegance. Especially when, as an architect, you have to build something huge, with different tasks, such as the building commissioned in the movie.
The most difficult thing in life for an artist is to find someone who is a visionary like him. Or at least that trusts him and allows him the necessary freedom for doing what he envisions. Let’s look at a concrete example. A great architectural example city is Vicenza. Vicenza is near Venice and it’s famous for the amazing 16th centuries villas of Andrea Palladio (1508- 1580). Palladio was born extremely humble. He was very lucky that, at a very young age, he met his great patron: Gian Giorgio Trissino. If Gian Giorgio had not invested in Andrea, paying for his studies, bringing him to Rome and finding the money to build, we would not have today the amazing worldwide famous villas of Veneto. And the new style he invented, matching civilization with nature, later known as ‘palladiano’. He left an incredible amount of masterpieces such as Basilica Palladiana or Villa Capra, ‘La Rotonda’ or the sumptuous theatre, known as ‘Teatro Olimpico’.
This story leads to the great power of The Brutalist: elegiac, epic and monumental. Brady Corbet’s hyperbolic story, written with Mona Fastvold, cements a monumental parable about the false promises of the American dream, especially those of migrants. The actor-turned-director has put together a sprawling narrative on the disgusting, corrupting influence of extreme wealth. In doing so he used Judy Becker’s superb and unforgettable production design, filmed by an amazing cinematographer such as Lol Crawley, already Corbet’s partner in Vox Lux.
To all this the result is a grainy, milky photography, délabré like an Edward Hopper greenish painting, set in the 1940s in a rising America which is soon to collapse instead, with all its turned-out-fake dreams. It’s also a movie on solitude and disillusion, shot and projected in 70 mm, many images of which are really unforgettable. Captured in the depth of each frame, stunning is the new born library, conceived under a special light by the talent of a poor immigrant, insulted and kicked out by the arrogant millionaire and house owner. Or in the beginning where the symbol for USA freedom, its Statue of Liberty, is seen upside down from the point of view of a crowded ship full of immigrants.
Set over several decades, Brady Corbet’s post-World War II saga is — like the architectural achievements of its protagonist — constructed with meticulous zeal, resulting in a work of miscellaneous technique and touching humanity.
Resurrecting what it means being human, more and more missing lately the so-called empathy. At the end the brutalist reverberates with the motto “Stay hungry. Stay foolish!” And especially do not dare to betray your dreams or let anybody else tread on them.
The Synopsis
Adrien Brody stars in an epic drama as László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect of the brutalist school. Hoping to rebuild his life and work, after surviving a concentration camp and the devastation of World War II, he emigrates to the United States. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he wins a contract from Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). This wealthy client will change the course of his life. Felicity Jones co-stars as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet. Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola co-star.
Gaia Serena Simionati
Edited by Alissa Simon
© FIPRESCI 2024