Malcolm & Marie2021

Wow. Master stroke of a writing, cinematography, performances and the brilliant soundtrack. Very artistic overall and B&W adds more to that. It not only explores the love and hate relationship between Zendaya and JDW (Who’s playing a filmmaker here) in a beautiful way, but it also unabashedly goes against the audacity of Hollywood critics and basically how industry reacts after the film is screened, from Malcolm’s POV. There’s one scene especially where Malcolm is targeting a White lady critic from L.A. times (Very funny and brilliant scene where Malcolm just goes all out for about 5-8 minutes) and according to him she doesn’t seem to understand the film even when she gives good review. He hates and says “Just because the film doesn’t star anybody who looks like her doesn’t mean it’s political”. He hates that the critic changes her viewpoints according to the ethnicity of the director and also gender.  He says - “She’s not looking at the film, the ideas within it, the emotions and the craft. Cinema doesn’t need to have a message, it needs to have a heart, an electricity. Idiots like this reduce everything to zeitgeist political messaging and hyperbole. You can’t hang everything on identity. You can’t say, I subverted this trope because I’m black, but fell into this one because I’m a man. Identities are constantly shifting”  It’s super brutal writing and no wonder it has not gone down well with some of the critics.  Anyways coming back to their love and hate relationship, it’s almost like they are playing badminton or any game like that. But it’s written so bloody well and not for a second I was distracted or got bored. It was all so random and organic that I couldn’t think of any word but SEXY. This whole film is gorgeous. I was literally counting how many of the shots were utterly beautiful to look at. Countless in fact. Started with an incredible 8 minutes scene to an incredible monologue-fight between the couple throughout to that unforgettable monologue in the end and that breathtakingly simple final shot. Ufff I can go on and on about this and it never stops.  Finally I want to say “THANK YOU”.