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This is actually among the showcase’s shortest: Flesh Impact, an ode to Marilyn Monroe starring both Dakota Johnson and 93-year-old screen legend Ellen Burstyn as iterations of the 1950s Hollywood powerhouse, which squeaks in at a compact 17 minutes. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also happens to be the president of this year’s competition jury on the Lido, it’s billed as a deconstruction of the myth of Marilyn, uncovering the real woman so often reduced to a glamorous pin-up, and imagining what her life would have been like had she not tragically passed away from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, at the age of just 36. Its timing is significant, too, arriving on the centenary of her birth, following a flurry of exhibitions and events – from the National Portrait Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait to the BFI’s Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star season – which have celebrated her life and legacy.
So, how does this stack up in its attempt to honour the star? Well, I’m sorry to say that it’s… a glorified car advert. As previously reported in Vanity Fair, Gyllenhaal was first approached to create the short by Amy Marentic, the chief marketing officer of luxury car brand Genesis Motor America, who wanted to work on a project centred on Monroe. The filmmaker initially wasn’t sure she was the right fit for it, but, after extensive research into Marilyn, changed her mind. The involvement of Gyllenhaal, Johnson and Burstyn offered the hope of something knotty and complex, despite the film’s commercial underpinnings. But, unfortunately, the result is a bit of a bizarre misfire.
It opens on Burstyn as an imagined older Marilyn, driving her shiny new electric car – note the plush interior and glittering hood. Then she parks and – I kid you not – hot wires it to a street lamp. An automated voice declares: “Your car is charging”. Her destination is a theatre where she has arrived for an audition, to be delivered to Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s husband and a frequent presence in her films) and The Pitt’s Sepideh Moafi. But, before she delivers her monologue, she tells them about her long and eventful life – one in which she has been constantly underestimated and dismissed.
Burstyn, the Oscar-winning star of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Last Picture Show and The Exorcist does all she can to sell the sequence – and, certainly, there is something strange and magical about seeing Marilyn as the veteran actor she never got to become, her blonde curls, beauty spot and bright white blouse and pencil skirt now accessorised with a cane. But, in its cursory potted history of her, the film also feels slight, offering nothing genuinely illuminating for those who already have a basic understanding of her career and personal life. There are well-meaning efforts to address the rampant sexism she faced, but you could learn about as much, if not more, from skimming her Wikipedia entry. You could argue that 17 minutes doesn’t allow for a deeper examination of these themes – but then, why not make a longer, more interesting movie?
In flashbacks, we’re then taken to young Marilyn’s turbulent childhood, and later see Johnson as Monroe, embodying the luminous star as she was at the height of her fame. Our first glimpses of her are tantalising, half hidden in shadow and creeping into the edges of the frame, but once we see her in full, the effect is less successful. Johnson, perhaps wisely, chooses not to do an impression of Marilyn or mimic her voice, but, ultimately, this simply makes you more conscious of watching Dakota in her Marilyn get-up, rather than feeling like she’s actually transformed into the silver screen icon.
Flesh Impact – thus named because director Billy Wilder (who cast Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot) used this phrase to describe her appeal, and how audiences felt they could almost touch her through the screen – is admirable in wanting to move beyond the legend of Marilyn. But, with its own fairytale-like structure, it can’t help but flatten her, too, creating its own kind of myth.
In the end, far worse things have been done to Monroe’s legacy – just see Andrew Dominik’s bonkers, trauma porn-y Ana de Armas vehicle Blonde from 2022. (Or, like, don’t.) But, Flesh Impact isn’t adding much to this conversation. Like so many efforts to capture the true essence of Marilyn, its subject, and her depths and contradictions, prove elusive, seeming to float away beyond the film’s grasp.
Gyllenhaal, Johnson and Burstyn have all made better work elsewhere and will continue to do so. (There’s a dissonance in Burstyn receiving Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at a screening of this film, though given what an extraordinary career she’s had over the past six decades, it hardly matters.) Gyllenhaal and Johnson’s last match-up was the slow-burning, fascinating drama The Lost Daughter – here’s hoping that their next can be something less commercial and more in that vein.