what’s Bradley Cooper’s movie about Leonard Bernstein value? | EUROtoday

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LFor a very long time, Bradley Cooper dreamed of being a conductor. As a toddler, he performed conducting symphonies and hoped to obtain a baton for Christmas. Having change into a director, right here he affords himself – and affords us – Maestro, a movie of outstanding aesthetic and narrative ambition, one of the lovely of this finish of yr. It tells the story of the conductor, trainer and composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper himself), writer, amongst different issues, of the rating for the musical West Side Story.

The movie begins with an aged Bernstein taking part in the piano for a tv present after which giving an interview. This entry within the movie is deceptive: Maestro shouldn’t be a standard “biopic”. Because what fascinates the filmmaker and performer in “Lenny” (the nickname given to him by his household and his viewers) is the query of the strain that genius inflicts on non-public life.

Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean actress, is the lady of his life. With her, his spouse for twenty-seven years, the music director of the New York Philharmonic has three youngsters. Their relationship is painted right here in all its depth: it’s a fixed sharing of concepts, feelings and ambitions. Felicia is the one one not solely to know him however above all to take a look at him with a demanding gaze, matching his extraordinary character. This is about philiaa real understanding of souls, greater thanEros. And the entire downside is thatEros – exactly – calls for its worth. While loving his spouse deeply, Leonard Bernstein is gay and, voracious in love as he’s in his artwork, doesn’t need to quit something.

Bernstein between monstrosity and genius

The rigidity between Felicia and Lenny explodes in an argument scene of ferocity worthy of an Ingmar Bergman movie. Because they know one another so effectively, as a result of they love one another so deeply, they know the way to harm one another higher than anybody. Like a heroine from the nice Hollywood cinema of the golden age, it’s Felicia (and Carey Mulligan, extraordinary) who emerges victorious from the confrontation. Because Bradley Cooper by no means lets his deep admiration for Bernstein soften his imaginative and prescient of the character. His Lenny is without delay a monster able to knowingly hurting these he loves, an irresistible charmer and a musical genius. The scene the place Bernstein refutes the rumors of homosexuality reported to him by his daughter is transferring on this respect. We see on the identical time and in the identical motion a loving father, a person tortured by his secret and a real manipulator.

Borrowing from musicals as effectively On the Town And West Side Story than to lesser identified however luxurious works like Trouble in Paradise Or At Quiet Place, the filmmaker matches his visible results to the feverish lyricism of the music. An anthology sequence recreates the well-known live performance at Ely Cathedral, England, the place Bernstein carried out the London Symphony Orchestra within the Symphony quantity 2 (Resurrection), by Gustav Mahler. “When Bernstein composes or directs, a nuclear energy is released,” explains the filmmaker.

Why Bradley Cooper seems like Clint Eastwood

There’s some Clint Eastwood in Bradley Cooper. Like his illustrious elder, who directed him in American Sniper (2015), the star reveals, in his forties, his true nature: that of a director. Clint Eastwood moved into directing at age 41, with A chill within the evening (1971), a movie the place music already performed a vital function (bear in mind “Misty”, the ballad composed by jazz pianist Erroll Garner).

Based on an thought from Clint Eastwood who wished to movie it with Beyoncé, Bradley Cooper had already signed a stupendous musical melodrama, A Star is Born (2018), and supplied Lady Gaga her movie debut. He demonstrates with Maestro qhe has the means to realize his ambitions. In an period the place American cinema, stubbornly geared in the direction of an adolescent viewers, tends to simplify the problems, the actor-director dares to make them extra delicate, extra advanced. “Bernstein abolishes the boundaries between genres,” the director of the Paris Opera, Alexander Neef, instructed us final yr, on the time of the entry into the repertoire of A Quiet Place. With him, there is no such thing as a longer any query of nice music or common music. We are in the fantastic thing about music and creation. » A press release that’s equally legitimate for Maestro.

Maestro by Bradley Cooper. With Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Michael Urie, Matt Bomer. Available on Netflix.


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