The Brutalist
That’s a brutal runtime, but fitting for an epic story. Ironic how a film about brutalism is so stylish. Kinda tone deaf to make a big deal of making aliyah in this conjecture, they should have used AI to change that instead.
Before Erzsébet comes to America, it’s all up up up. From Elis Island, to living with the cousin, to falling out with him and love in a poorhouse, to work in construction, to meeting the rich dude again and go straight to the moon, hobnobbing with the local jet set. He doesn’t mingle much, his Jewishness is too apparent, and he’s not very gregarious.
Being a dope fiend doesn’t help either. But his addiction doesn’t stop him from being productive. Everyone hates his guts, including his self-hating Jew cousin who married a goy and changed his name. Attila is such a great name, why change it. His position is pretty safe since the boss likes him very much, he can resist most saboteurs.
Our hero is pretty chaste towards the opposite gender, even his own wife doesn’t turn him on. Probably for good reason, his only on screen experiences get more tragic as we get along, being mocked by a prostitute is the high point. Against his wife’s wishes, he goes to Italy to restart his fledgling architecture career, gets drunk and high with the boss, and he makes his domination feelings for him being felt, into his own flesh. The final sexual encounter is injecting the wife with both heroin and his penis, the only way he can give her pleasure.
The wife should really be the protagonist, she’s got a better story. Dumped in Dachau, survives with a little kid, gets to the US with some help but sustains a household on intellectual work, all this while disabled. In that interplay of sex and heroin, she hears her husband confess being raped by his boss, and literally goes to their fancy house and fucking shames him TO HIS FACE, in front of guests. The balls of that woman!
Visually, this is striking, I’ll give them that. Vistavision is described by the director as some contraption to pull a regular 35mm film strip sideways, to have more space for gorgeous visuals. They deliver, with minuscule budget even. This is actually the director of Vox Lux!
Still a much better film about architects than The Fountainhead. Megalopolis is not even in the same league.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.