Dias desses recebi o texto de uma aluna sobre o filme Sunset Boulevard.
Professora orgulhosa que sou, gostaria de compartilhar com vocês
esta análise porque acredito ser bem elaborada e madura. Sunset Boulevard é uma pérola, um filme que discute como poucos as mulheres e a indústria de Hollywood.
Este filme já foi exibido pelo Cinemulher e rendeu uma discussão muito boa.
Este texto vem a somar.
Para S. em especial:
Keep walking girl! I´m proud of you!
Maristela
A brief analysis of “Sunset Boulevard” film by Billy Wilder
The movie tells the history of Norma Desmonds, an old famous actress of a silent film who can’t accept the new times commanded by the sound movies. In this context, Norma meets by chance, a young bankrupt screenwriter who she hires to write a script for her. The actress falls for him and so he lives in her house because she dreams about returning to the cinema. Therefore, when the man falls for a screenwriter girl, Norma discovers and kills him. In the end scene, ironically no one can see her returning to the fame, but to in the police news.
The history by Norma Desmonds confuses itself with the true cinema history: the transition from the silent movie to the sound movie and also the beginning of the cultural industry.
The character played by Norma Desmonds is an emblematic image of the old world cinema, a world that didn’t want to die. Her personatily is expressed by the old and decadent things around her: her strange mansion with the candlesticks, sumptuous beds, many portraits of herself, oriental tissues everywhere; in short, the ancient and outdate objects where everything seems a scene from the roman noir. Everything was very old and the smell of decadence is everywhere. Besides that her behavior; she’s unbalanced, one can see this through her grandiloquent gestures she seems to be acting all the time. She can’t take apart the fictional life from the real life.
According to this, she’s helped by Max, her first husband who became her butler. He doesn’t escape from the past like her: they live on the remains of the past glory. They close themselves against the world to survive.
What concerns screenwriter character, we can say that he’s ambiguous: he’s between easy life with her and free life by his own effort, far from the dependence. He never decides; he says one thing, but he fells other. He’s weak and his weakness will be his end.
One can see two worlds, both in trouble: on one hand, a decadent actress, attached to the past glory unable to modernize, unable to face the new times or adapt herself to the new social conditions. But the problem is not only her: she stopped in the time, it’s true, but one can’t forget that she was a victim of the social process that consumes every one. On the other hand, the screenwriter character is a little upstart; someone who wants rise in life in the kind of job that becomes increasingly competitive.
So, there are two moments for the cinema’s history – accordingly, we can say that this movie is like a metaphor of a cinema development –; one is ending, another is beginning, but both are subjected to power of money.
S.
