Review "Malcolm & Marie" on Netflix: fragment of a love dialogue

"It's not a love story. This is the story of love. " This is how Malcolm & Marie rightly sums up in its trailer. This intimate and universal lock-up filmed in black and white by Sam Levinson, the director of the series Euphoria, sees Malcolm and Marie (brilliantly played by John David Washington and Zendaya) tear each other apart and love each other, in passionate monologues about their feelings and cinema. A magnificent ode to love that invites itself into a moment of intense and heartbreaking life.  Returning from the premiere night of Malcolm's film, Marie reproaches him for not thanking him during his speech. If the starting point of this evening may seem trivial, it will revive the couple's rancour and lead them into a downward spiral throughout the night, with long successive monologues in which each can not help hurting and loving the other at the same time. Desire, selfishness, the unspoken, lack, mystery, admiration, tenderness, hatred, love. So many feelings and obligatory passages that make us love the other and hate him at the same time, so many moments of life of a couple that will make Malcolm and Marie live on the screen the time of a film around universal feelings, but also cinema.

Love crystallized in one evening

From the first moments of Malcolm & Marie, the tone is set: the lovers constantly separated by the angles and partitions of the isolated house foreshadow the breaking of the dialogue and the heartbreaking evening to come. And it is in this fragment of pure and unstable life that all the wounds of passionate love will crystallize, in universal scenes that will speak to all those who have loved.With sharp words, Malcolm and Marie will break for an evening this implicit contract of the couple, to expose all the cracks of it in an uncontrollable ego war. All the stages of passion pass through it: forgetfulness of the other and complacency of security, selfishness of love and the feeling of being loved, dependence and emotional blackmail, need and desire to hurt and be hurt, confrontation with one's own contradictions, impossibility of saying "thank you". If at the beginning of Malcolm & Marie Sam Levinson films the couple seen from the outside, following the incessant and heady back and forth of Malcolm , the camera will gradually get closer, entering ever deeper into the intimacy, the past, the wounds of the two characters. And while we could take sides and recognize ourselves during the first moments in one or the other, the wrongs gradually become shared and the terribly human faults of each are declined like the multiple shades of black and white of the image.Beyond the two lovers, the director depicts the deeper and universal inability of the human being to love and be loved at the same time, to accept that his own complexity can also be found in the other in an even more complex reality that is revealed through the prism of multifaceted mirrors. And in a finale that closes this timeless moment, the camera lands this time inside, as an invitation to think about this film in our own love speech, looking at Malcolm and Marie who are outside, looking at a future that belongs only to them.

Love declared in cinema

One cannot help but see in Malcolm & Marie a modern tribute to the great Hollywood romances, punctuated by music that evokes desire and sublimated by this pure and poetic black and white. These two characters behind closed doors, this unique time and place that respect the rules of classical theater, give as much strength to filmed love as to the love of filming. The references and quotes follow one another, the most striking being played perhaps outside this house with this desire for escape and this need to miss the other that we find in the sublime L'Aurore de Murnau: almost a hundred years later, the words and image of this masterpiece continue to inspire the greatest scenes of current cinema. And if Malcolm and Marie's conflict is played out around their own love story, the film allows, through its director character who refuses criticism and persuades himself of his art, a very current reflection on cinema itself. Malcolm, by his heady passion that shapes and destroys him at the same time, poses himself as a director and cursed poet, overwhelmed by the difference of vision and the propriety of a cinema too political. The legitimacy of talking about a particular subject or filming an action is then transposed to the love of the two characters; Am I allowed to film this subject? Do I have the right to love this person? How does my own identity, defined in spite of myself, influence all my right to love the other and my art? So many questions that nourish the perpetual creation of art that is created before our eyes for the duration of a film. An implacable judgment of a brutal and irresistible love, Malcolm & Marie will undoubtedly be a centerpiece of its director Levinson, thanks to a controlled and passionate image and a dazzling interpretation. A nugget to discover on Netflix without further delay.

Malcolm & Marie Trailer