{"id":157794,"date":"2025-01-20T14:41:35","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T14:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=e9cafa17280c4da881aa80016763a815"},"modified":"2025-01-20T14:41:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T14:41:35","slug":"the-brutalist-review-gorgeous-capital-c-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/20\/the-brutalist-review-gorgeous-capital-c-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brutalist review \u2013 gorgeous, capital-C Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"
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L<\/span>ouis Kahn, one of the great American architects, adored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. \u201cAll Bach cared about was the truth. Indefinable, unmeasurable truth,\u201d he said of the composer. \u201cAnd so it is with architecture. It\u2019s a search for the truth.\u201d Kahn, who had immigrated to the United States from Kuressaare (now Estonia) with his family as a young boy, lived and worked in Philadelphia, where he would begin a career defined by geometric forms and a reverence for the ancient ruins of Europe.<\/p>\n

His work \u2013 much of which still stands today, constructed with durable concrete and an unmistakable formality \u2013 inspired generations of architects and artists to search for their own truth. The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s six-years-in-the-making study of a fictional Hungarian-American architect named L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th, has an advantage over a building in that it can be both a fabrication and deconstruction at the same time. But, as Kahn encouraged, it\u2019s all true, all the beauty and all the terror that the T\u00f3th family faces in the new world.<\/p>\n

The striking architecture of Adrien Brody\u2019s face is what first becomes apparent, amid the darkness and rhythmic chug of a steamship. Two green eyes, wide as dinner plates, and the elegant slope of his nose peak out from the bowels of the vessel \u2013 and then another face comes into the frame. The great, oxidised visage of Lady Liberty, beckoning immigrants forth at Ellis Island. The year is 1947 \u2013 having survived the occupation of Budapest and internment at Buchenwald, L\u00e1zsl\u00f3 gazes upon liberation. His coal-streaked face breaks into a wild, disbelieving grin. He laughs out of some mixture of disbelief and relief. He has escaped fascism; now he is home.<\/p>\n

In three-and-a-half hours (including a fifteen-minute intermission built into the film) Corbet deconstructs the myth of America with scalpel precision, working in the same sharp geometric lines as his protagonist. When L\u00e1szl\u00f3 arrives in Philadelphia, brought to the Land of Opportunity by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) to help run his furniture and renovation business, his nose is broken from the perilous journey and he regards his new home with equal parts bewilderment and intrigue. A badly received commission initially leads L\u00e1szl\u00f3 into poverty, where he develops a friendship with single father Gordon (Isaach De Bankol\u00e9) in a shelter for the unhoused. The two work taxing construction jobs and ease their chronic pain with heroin, until fate brings L\u00e1szl\u00f3 a visitor in the form of wealthy businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) who develops a fascination with the architect and his work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Brutalism as an architectural style is among the most divisive \u2013 critics frequently interpret its harshness as ugliness, and since the height of its popularity throughout the 50s – 70s, many buildings have become widely loathed or torn down altogether. But brutalism, which is a starkly functional practice, favours simplicity and honesty. There is nowhere to hide in a building comprised of angles and open spaces. So too is there nowhere to hide in Corbet’s film, where the capitalist rot of the past eighty years permeates like a fog. L\u00e1szl\u00f3, although stubborn, mean, reckless and frequently disagreeable, is also violently abused by a world that holds little stock in true beauty.<\/p>\n

Brody, a man of sharp angles and radiant softness, is phenomenally cast here, with a vulnerability in his green eyes and expressive, upturned brows that renders him at once heartbreakingly beautiful and terrible. He is surrounded by more obvious ugliness: the tacky, louche avarice and snobbery of Van Buren (Pearce is on astounding form), scars from the war that exist in his wife\u2019s osteoporosis and niece’s muteness; a phenomenally ambitious, almost insurmountable construction project, dogged by penny-pinching yanks and L\u00e1szl\u00f3\u2019s self-destructive streak.<\/p>\n

And yes, the word \u201cepic\u201d is bandied about in film every few months at this point, slapped on whatever festival darling is the flavour of the month, but how else should one describe both Corbet\u2019s narrative scope (the film, divided into three chapters and an overture, takes place over three decades, on two continents) and physical craft? Shot on 70mm VistaVision by Lol Crawley (who also shot Vox Lux<\/a> and Childhood of a Leader<\/a>) and scored by Daniel Blumberg (who worked with Corbet on his performance\/short film project GYUTO in 2019, and scored co-writer Mona Fastvold\u2019s 2021 drama The World to Come<\/a>), these recurring collaborations suggest a mutual understanding that has led to the breathtaking end product that is The Brutalist, where each frame is a Hopper-esque portrait of American individualism and isolation.<\/p>\n

It is, like those beautiful concrete monstrosities which are revered and reviled in equal measure, a film that towers across the Venice line-up this year, tragic and wry and gorgeous and disturbing \u2013 any number of hyperbolic terms might apply to the beast that Corbet has created in The Brutalist. But what really remains, amid the rubble of the auditorium after all the cinema patrons are gone, is the echo of something mournful: this is a eulogy for a world in an eternal death rattle, brilliant and bleak \u2013 and as Louis Kahn demanded it \u2013 true.<\/p>\n

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