Joker: Folie à Deux 4K 2024

Phillips is a smart man, he didn't bend under anyone (at least not the audience), he didn't bounce back after the resounding success into the safe position of producer of a calculated sequel, and he made an auteur movie - not stupid, unusual, but very niche and almost insanely willing to go against the wind.

There are reasons not to like the second Joker. It is clearly and deliberately simpler than the original, it lacks the plastic energy, less visual freshness, and very tangentially realized the possibilities of the musical. It doesn't have the same scope for postmodernist games of interpretation, although who knows, maybe we just haven't waited for an attentive viewer yet. To some, the movie will say little new. Some will be offended by the audacious break with the graphic canon - some popular characters were not used at all, others (like Harvey Dent) were shown frankly colorless, and about the third decided to tell a joke that few people understood. ...a lot of viewers seem to be banally bored at the unexpectedly sentimental, meditative, conversational movie, now wanting compensation for not put on the table action and diluted by some snotty Sinatra not promised, but expected in advance, chemistry between the mad clown and mad Harley. But it's a massive request, the viewer may wonder, and the first Joker wasn't massive anyway, was it? No, it was.

The greatness of the first Joker was in his will to please everyone, the power of hypertext, simultaneously absolutely mass and entirely authorial. The second Joker is free of that will and looks within himself. He decides his either/or, defending his position as a lone author to all sorts of “masses” who know better than anyone what his “true face” should be. The hordes of disappointed fans Phillips anticipated and placed right inside the frame.

In this courtroom drama without a fourth wall, the hero has plenty of lawyers for every taste, but not a single friend. They all talk some nonsense, comparing his two personalities with such pedantry as if they were roommates in a communal apartment and the only question is which one to evict. This nonsense is built into this or that grid of expectations, and there are rules of speech for it. But there are no rules of utterance for hearing the defendant himself, modern courts are not invented for that. And in that sense, Phillips' sequel continues the theme of the eternal Gotham quite well - we're still waiting for a miracle, because our diverse institutions to be fair, to help people, or even just to hear them, are ready except very occasionally. So of all the clouds of directions to criticize the movie, the only one I disagree with is that the sequel discredits and even betrays the original. “A dysfunctional society breeds criminals,” the Joker tells us. “And they are criminals,” the sequel quietly adds. It's interesting, of course, to ponder what particular organization of society has led to the fact that we have such a hard time at times reconciling these two unsophisticated ideas with each other.

... Should I watch it? If you think that the author owes something to the viewer - no. But if you want to ponder quietly what the author wants to say and why, you can take a risk! The capitalist film industry does not often allow itself such expensive challenges to its own audience.