14/29
The Venice Film Festival?
Plot
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their heritage and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client.. Laszlo Toth was also the man’s name. who tampered with Michelangelo’s Pieta statue with a hammer.
Brutalist is full of surprises
(2024). The characters are not what you expect – not in the ultimate Scooby Doo way, but in more subtle and incremental ways that real people are revealed – they unfold over time, in a new context or when forced by circumstances. Here the setting is post-WWII-horror.
What is the lesson?
Adrien Brody’s Laszlo, a Jewish architect who has escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, makes his way into the welcoming arms of America – or faces it – in a frantic opening sequence that evokes the fact that he was literally born by the Statue of Liberty. Let it become a journey of perpetual navigation through life’s variety of horrors: existential, professional, familial, intimate—never taking its eyes off the prize of great achievement and never assessing the value of that prize. Is it the shameful discovery that his success was born not in spite of his trauma, but because of it?
Do we have a duty to abuse?
To the forces of culture, country, power and those who hold it, in building our brutal legacies (and homelands)? Are our lives burning gasoline on the way to a more meaningful place? The movie is charming, cool looking and not boring.
But there is nothing new
Apparently it’s based on an old novel — a mystery tome I’d love to mine for some of the details the movie refuses to share. This aging man’s search for meaning becomes ours too. And any better understanding of Lazslo’s arrival, his families' the machinations, his country, and his rootlessness, for better or for worse, he feels it is up to us to construct.