However stressful Venice can get – the sweat, the coffee queues, the ticketing system – it’s hard to feel disgruntled here for long. For a start, Venice has the world’s jolliest festival trailer, a gorgeously coloured animation of King Kong, acrobats and flying cowboys, all set to jangling ukulele. It puts you in a joyous mood at the start of every film, although it might not last when you’re confronted by something as brutally bleak as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. Absolutely the hot ticket in the Venice competition, this is the much-awaited biopic of Marilyn Monroe, as imagined in the novel by Joyce Carol Oates.
Or, rather, it’s the story of “Marilyn Monroe”, the alter ego of a young woman named Norma Jeane: an artificial creation that the young star comes to despise, but also becomes addicted to, as she navigates a succession of traumas, starting with her childhood subjection to the volatility of her disturbed mother (Julianne Nicholson). Haunted by the phantom of a never-known father, Norma Jeane looks for “Daddy” in the men she marries – Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) – but only finds happiness of a sort in a sexually intense triangle with the narcissistic sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G Robinson.
