Portraits of Marilyn miss the magic
The Mystery Of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes (15, 101 mins)
Verdict: Some like it cheap ★★✩✩✩ The Velvet Queen (12A, 92 mins)
Verdict: Silly words, amazing pictures ★★★★✩
Who is the most famous woman in the world, living or dead? The Queen? Beyonce? Princess Diana? oprah Winfrey? It won’t startle you to learn the choice of the man behind The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes.
he’s a former BBC journalist called Anthony Summers, and in 1982, when the Los Angeles District Attorney reopened the investigation into her death, he conducted hundreds of interviews, trying to make more headway than the DA.
he claims to have no fewer than 650 tape recordings with those who knew Monroe, snippets of which are played in this Netflix documentary with actors lip-syncing the words.
Understandably, perhaps, but very unhelpfully, Summers inflates the significance of his mission with a degree of earnestness, teetering on pomposity, that becomes increasingly counter-productive. ‘The truth and Marilyn, it’s like going into the lion’s den,’ he declares, self-importantly.
Maybe it was once. But is it still? When one of his 1982 interviewees politely explains that he doesn’t want to talk about Monroe’s 1962 death 20 whole years after the event, the thought arises that 60 years later, maybe it’s three times as unseemly to rake it all up again.
DoUBTLeSS aware of that potential charge, director emma Cooper does her level best to imbue her film with drama and suspense, hence all the lip-syncing, some of it shot in shadow, which cheapens what could be fascinating.
on the credit side, there’s lots of fabulous archive footage of Monroe (and her second husband, Arthur Miller), both on screen and off, and when the film finally addresses her suspected suicide, aged 36, it at least illuminates what Summers describes as the lion’s den.
It’s now no secret that U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, were both involved with Monroe. Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne, tells Summers that she saw the Kennedys’ brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, effectively ‘pimping’ her out to both of them. But did the Kennedys order the FBI to murder her, as one wellknown conspiracy theory avers?
Summers gives us his verdict, which is undoubtedly wellinformed, but not entirely worth the wait.
■ A SIGHTING of the snow leopard, on the other hand, very much is.
The Velvet Queen is another documentary, following the painstaking efforts of two Frenchmen, in the bleakly beautiful highlands of Tibet, to find what was already one of the world’s most elusive creatures even before it was officially classified on lists of endangered species as ‘vulnerable’. Marie Amiguet’s Frenchlanguage film was made for television, but was considered so cinematic that it’s now getting a big-screen release.
I first saw it late one night at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and was snapped out of end-of-day weariness by an incredibly powerful image: a lone snow leopard, sleek and elegant, standing on a mountain ledge, considering its options and looking anything but vulnerable.
In a way, that blows the ending. Sorry. But there’s never too much doubt that nature photographer Vincent Munier — so skilled that he won the prestigious BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition three years in succession — and his companion, writer Sylvain Tesson, will eventually find what they are looking for.
Their solemn and, it has to be said, rather Gallic philosophising along the way veers between the pretentiously Promethean (‘I’d stolen fire ... I carried within me the embers’) and the insanely incomprehensible (‘the righthere-right-now of modern epilepsy ran into the most-likely-nothingever of the blind’).
Still, let’s be generous and ascribe the latter to bad subtitling. either way, even if you’d much rather have Sir David Attenborough as a guide, some of the photography in this film is truly breathtaking.