[CINÉMA] Joker: madness for two, deception on merchandise

In 2019, director Todd Phillips experienced huge success with Jokera film dedicated to the origins of Batman’s main antagonist. Awarded a Golden Lion in Venice and two Oscars (for best actor and best music), this feature film, eagerly awaited by fans of the Dark Knight, garnered more than a billion dollars in revenue. A great commercial success for this not very healthy project celebrating nothing less than the advent of an antihero, a dangerous and crazy criminal – the author of these lines shamefully assumes his guilty pleasure…

A psychologization that is debated

Nevertheless, the film did not fail to divide the public, with some believing, not without reason, that this naturalistic and Hugolian version of the Joker greatly distanced us from the expressionist universe of Bob Kane, creator of Batman. Because in fact, if he offered Joaquin Phoenix a role to his (dis)measure, director Todd Phillips, excessively “yellow vest” the character and drawing his inspiration from the cinema of Scorsese (Taxi Driver and above all The Waltz of the Puppets), radically deviated from the traditional, buffoonish and anarchic image of the Joker, the one to which Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto had conformed. More depressive, even neurasthenic, Joaquin Phoenix’s version lost this madness, this humor which, once, won our support and made us secretly hope for the victory of Gotham City’s greatest villain. Let us point out in passing that Heath Ledger’s version already announced, in 2008, this coming psychologization and this progressive loss of humor of the character.

The Joker falls in love

Five years after the commercial success of Jokerdirector Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix are back for a second opus. A prison story with the trappings of a musical comedy and a courtroom film.

About to be tried for the crimes he committed in the first part, Arthur Fleck is interned among the insane in the famous Arkham Asylum. There, our Joker meets Lee Quinzel (future Harley Quinn), a fellow inmate and arsonist with whom he immediately falls under the spell. Mutually, the two will engage in what psychiatrists describe as “folie a deux”…

By incorporating the character of Harley Quinn (created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm in the 1992 animated series) into his Joker diptych, the director seems, at first glance, to fully assume the Batman universe and promises us, in doing so, an extraordinary criminal union for our two antiheroes, worthy of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

Hopes thwarted

This promise will not be kept… Because if Lee Quinzel, played by Lady Gaga, whose acting talents have no longer been demonstrated Guccilimits itself here to symbolically embodying the spectator of the film, with his fascination, his expectations and even his demands with regard to the Joker, Arthur Fleck will never truly dare to take the plunge. The director takes great pleasure in frustrating his audience by circumventing the promised destiny of the main character, with the air of not touching it. A false-ass positioning by which Todd Phillips proves to us that he does not take responsibility for his subject. Two two-hour films to learn that the Joker will never become the Joker is a lot. “What’s the point?” », the viewer legitimately asks. The filmmaker, in his defense, warned us when the first film was released: “We don’t do [un film] on the Joker we tell the story of [quelqu’un] who becomes the Joker. »

In these conditions, there is no point in going to theaters, we might as well rewatch The Waltz of the Puppets by Martin Scorsese…

1 star out of 5

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