45/18
Referenced in Close-Up: Why do We Need the Venice Film Festival?
Scenario
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client.. IMDb Editor Arno Kazarian offers up quick takes on 12 movies he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous, curiously erotic Misericordia.. Laszlo Toth was also the name of the man who defaced the Michelangelo statue The Pieta with a hammer..
The Brutalist is full of surprises
(2024). The characters are not who you expect – not in the Scooby Doo ending kinda way, but in the more subtle, incremental ways that real people reveal themselves – they unfurl over time, in new context, or when forced by circumstance.Here the circumstance is post-WWII horror. Adrien Brody's Laszlo, a jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, ekes into the welcoming arms of America.
Do we owe a debt to abuse?
Or is confronted by them – in a frenetic opening sequence that evokes being literally birthed by the Statue of Liberty. His becomes a journey of perpetually navigating life's grand variety of horrors – existential, professional, inter-personal, intimate – never taking his eyes off the prize of grand achievement, and never assessing the value of that prize to begin with. What's the lesson?Is it the shameful discovery that his success wasn't born in spite of his trauma, but because of it?
But there is no novel
To the forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in the making of our brutal legacies? Are our lives gasoline that gets burned up and route to some place more meaningful?The movie is charming, cool looking, and not boring (did you hear it was long?). It feels like it's based on a mysterious old novel – a tome that I would love to mine for some of the details the movie refuses to share.