Havanans Will Be Able to See Ana de Armas in Blonde at the Yara Cinema and the Cuban Film Institute

October 5, 2022

The American film by Australian director Andrew Dominik, starring Cuban Ana de Armas, will be shown at the Yara and Chaplin cinemas.

"Blonde" is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by writer Joyce Carol Oates, which mixes real and fictional data to delve into the life of the actress.

Blonde is not a biographical film, a biopic (biographical picture), but something quite different: the fictionalization of a life based on the homonymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which I will not discuss here. This is the ignition button when embarking on any approach to the film by New Zealand director Andrew Dominik that just premiered on Netflix on September 28th. Pointing this out means warning the reader about a kind of blank check to fabricate that, at the end of the day, ends up as the great Achilles heel of a genetically sinister, abrupt and viscous film about the duality Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe (MM), one of the most powerful icons of American popular culture of all time.

One of the few merits of Blonde is the acting of Ana Celia de Armas Caso, a Cuban born in 1988 and raised in the small town of Santa Cruz del Norte, a galaxy away from Hollywood, and until now only known, if at all, for its rum factory. She is already the new acquisition of the industry in films such as No Time to Die (2020), where she plays the role of a Cuban CIA agent alongside the James Bond of the moment, actor Daniel Craig. Or that girl who works alongside Keanu Reeves in Knock, Knock (2015). With her performance in Blonde, de Armas surpasses the work of actresses who have previously embodied MM on celluloid, particularly Misty Rowe (Goodbye Norma Jean, 1976) and Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn, 2011).

And it is no small feat to have accomplished it despite her ethnicity, a challenge that producers like Brad Pitt accepted from the start. The decision must be seen in the context of a movement aimed at breaking traditional roles for minorities in Hollywood, particularly for Latinos or Hispanics, visible in the leading roles granted in recent times to actresses such as the Spanish Penélope Cruz or the Mexican Salma Hayek and the Spanish Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem. De Armas is indeed neither American, nor bilingual, nor bicultural and despite this they gave her the task of embodying one of the most powerful myths not only of the United States but of the twentieth century.