Joker: Folie à Deux (Joker 2): is Not the Disaster Everyone is Telling You About
After having its world premiere at the 81st Venice Film Festival and having received mixed reviews and opinions, the highly anticipated Joker: Folie à Deux finally debuts in Italian theaters with Warner Bros. Pictures starting Wednesday, October 2. The sequel to the box office hit (but also winner of the Golden Lion at Venice 76 and two Oscars) had already caused discussion at the time of its announcement: an unrequested sequel? But why? Will it even be a musical? With Lady Gaga in the role of Harley Quinn? Sacrilege!
A project that is certainly very risky and with particularly unbridled ambitions, given that the first cinematic chapter of 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips was a completely autonomous big-screen project, both from a production and narrative point of view. How to create the perfect sequel to a film that had created around itself in a very short time an aura of cult of historical dimensions? Deconstructing expectations and iconography of the Gotham City crime clown in a second appointment that is certainly imperfect and inconsistent, but so proudly against the grain compared to the formula of the contemporary cinecomic that it instead deserves a more in-depth and less superficial analysis.
What is Joker: Folie à Deux (Joker 2) About?
We saw the film in its world premiere at the 81st Venice Film Festival, and we told you about it like this: in Joker: Folie à Deux we find ourselves in the criminal asylum of Arkham, where Arthur Fleck/Joker is locked up awaiting murder trial. Life is not easy at all, oppressed by the guards, and is now far from that revolutionary impetus that had made him a dark hero for the masses of Gotham. The cards on the table are mixed up by the entrance on the scene of “Lee” Quinzel, a patient admitted to the non-criminal wing of the psychiatric institute. Lee is fascinated by Arthur, by what he has done, and above all, she knows what Joker represents. The feelings and passion between the two quickly explode and, as the date of the trial approaches, Lee instills more and more self-confidence in the protagonist, now aware of the power that the Joker can exercise on people.
The relationship between Lee and Arthur is punctuated by musical interludes, which come to life in another world in which the two protagonists have complete control of the reality that surrounds them. The musical, as we were saying, becomes a means to tell the mental disorder and to “cure” the fractured minds of Arthur and Lee, who find an escape route in each other and in the moments they live together. Cinecomic, schizophrenic and dark musical, prison movie, and finally also a procedural drama: the sequel directed by Todd Phillips and co-written by the director together with Scott Silver is a prodigious tribute to the power of the cinematographic genres that distinguish it, without forgetting to pick up the narrative steps on which we left the character of Arthur Fleck at the end of the great feature film of 2019.
A Comic Book Movie Against the Grain?
Cleverly sold as a musical pas de deux between the Joker played by an ever-gigantic Joaquin Phoenix (who here too, shows off a sumptuous and painful performance) and Lee Quinzel played by an unprecedented Lady Gaga, the film coming out in Italian theaters starting from Wednesday, October 2nd is much more, a completely unconventional cinecomic that plays wisely and cruelly with the (legitimate) expectations of the public and the industry press, who already imagined an all-out musical, a (lucid?) daydream that unified the distorted and fragile minds of two potential super-criminals through the power of song and dance. A perfect opportunity to sell a seemingly irrelevant sequel thanks to the entry into the cast of an unpredictable performer who fits well with the narrative needs of cinematic work entirely built on the themes of mental distress and illness.
So Lady Gaga (here at her third significant acting test for a feature film destined for the cinemas after A Star Is Born and House of Gucci) very quickly becomes the cover girl and the iconographic image of a Harley Quinn who justifies the transformation of the sequel into a gothic and introspective musical, with her head held high in the face of the cumbersome and totalitarian presence in front of the camera of the protagonist played by Joaquin Phoenix at the top of his acting abilities. The result is that of a musical film, but much less anchored to the premonitions and founding elements of the American genre, and structured instead as a very intelligent and surprising investigation into the effects of the figure of the Joker on Arthur’s fractured mind and in the iconoclasm of the citizens of Gotham City, ready for a real social revolt in the name of that criminal clown who had threatened the administrative status quo of the fictional city with (hysterical) laughter and bullets on live television.
All Musical!
But before being a deconstructive reflection on the figure of the Joker within the narrative universe created by Todd Phillips, Joker: Folie à Deux is first and foremost (also) a musical. Borrowing a kermesse of pre-existing songs, Arthur and Lee escape from the disillusionment of their daily lives through the use of their voices and dance steps. First classmates in a singing class within the re-education program of the maximum-security prison of Arkham, then lightning-fast lovers on the front pages and causing a journalistic scandal; their incredible love story is a schizophrenic jukebox that stentorianly straddles mental clarity and madness (for two), framed by sumptuous and delirious performances of famous songs, such as Get Happy and That’s Entertainment.
At first, hummed, sometimes whispered, often performed at the top of one’s lungs or in dance steps, the musical compositions that dot Joker: Folie à Deux are the wrapping paper that protects and conceals Phillips’ cinematic product, the true nature of which is revealed only in the darkness of a theater, when the spectators (convinced that they are facing a dark musical performed by the verve of Lady Gaga) find themselves faced with a mélange of cinematic genres and narrative languages where the fulcrum of the story once again becomes, even more predominantly, the jagged mind of Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, with Stefani Germanotta’s Lee Quinzel “relegated” to a mere propulsive instrument for our protagonist and his fragile and violent legal and love affairs.
Deconstructing the Joker as We Know Him?
In the end, we came to discover that Joker 2 is certainly not the musical feature film that they had promised and sold us, quite the opposite. Consciously rowing against the expectations of the entire world, Phillips and Silver have packaged a sequel that is certainly less incisive than the cult film of five years earlier, more imperfect and flawed, but which takes narrative and content risks that are extremely rare when compared to recent comic book movies (even the most serious ones). If the first appointment of 2019 was a painful and violent story of the birth of a contemporary villain who was almost square and without shortcuts, Folie à Deux chooses the path of unpredictability, that of the deconstruction of the iconography of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Initially a symbol of an incel revolution that fit well with the social turmoil in Trump’s United States and then a pop mass phenomenon, Phillips’ Joker necessarily needed a sequel that reflected the consequences and reflections of that phenomenon. Rather than doubling down on elements and clichés that could have repeated its global success, Joker: Folie à Deux chooses the path of ineffability, abstruseness, and deception toward its own cinematic audience. Proudly impure and wavering, all things considered, Joker 2 is not at all the disaster everyone is telling you about, far from it; in fact, perhaps in a few years, we will cautiously reevaluate it as one of the most peculiar and courageous big-budget gambles of the last few decades, whether we like it or not.
