Joker: Folie a Deux - a bold, brilliant sequel
Rating:
Five years have passed since the triumphant opening of Joker at the Venice Film Festival. I still vividly remember reeling out of a morning screening, dazzled less by the unforgiving glare of the Venetian sun than by the movie we’d just been shown.
Five years have passed since the triumphant opening of Joker at the Venice Film Festival. I still vividly remember reeling out of a morning screening, dazzled less by the unforgiving glare of the Venetian sun than by the movie we’d just been shown.
Last night, here in Venice, came the world premiere of the sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux The director is again Todd Phillips, with Joaquin Phoenix once more in the title role, this time joined by Lady Gaga as what I suppose we must call the love interest, although that would undervalue her wonderful performance.
The film is audaciously different in style from the original, not quite as electrifying, but bold and brilliant all the same.
It begins with a kind of sinister jauntiness with a Joker animation in the style of a Tom & Jerry cartoon, to show that since the events of the first movie, Arthur Fleck along with his murderous alter ego has become a cultural phenomenon in Gotham City. There has even been a TV movie about him.
Joaquin Phoenix is once more in the title role, this time joined by Lady Gaga as what I suppose we must call the love interest, although that would undervalue her wonderful performance
The film is audaciously different in style from the original, not quite as electrifying, but bold and brilliant all the same
But Arthur is behind bars, waiting to see whether he will be judged sane enough to stand trial for murder, and in the meantime enjoying his celebrity status both with fellow prisoners and even the warders, one of whom, a sadistic Irishman played by Brendan Gleeson, feeds him cigarettes in return for jokes.
Lady Gaga plays Lee, a fellow inmate on her way, we suppose, to becoming Joker’s girlfriend Harley Quinn. The pair hit it off at a music therapy class, and are soon mutually smitten, but Lee makes it clear that she loves the dangerously charismatic Joker, ‘clown prince of crime’, not the gloomily introspective Arthur.
Indeed, identity confusion is the theme of this film, which delves even deeper than the original into schizophrenia and other types of mental illness.
It's been said that Folie a Deux is a musical. It’s not, but music looms large as an expression of Arthur and Lee’s burgeoning love for one another. It is while watching Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 classic The Band Wagon that Lee, who claims to have been imprisoned for arson, sets fire to their prison wing.
The ensuing chaos provides an excellent opportunity to escape, yet Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver toy with our expectations throughout; each time we anticipate which way the narrative is going to go, it confounds us by wheeling off in another direction.
The music is a constant, though, with Lady Gaga giving her interpretation of lovely old Burt Bacharach and even Motown numbers, and Phoenix more than holding his own. There are also a couple of swooning dance routines that make Arthur and Lee look like psychotic versions of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land.
Eventually, after Arthur’s high-profile TV appearance with a smug interviewer played by Steve Coogan, it is time for the trial, with all of Gotham gripped by the subject of multiple personality disorder.
Is Arthur the defendant accused of five murders, or is it Joker? His kindly lawyer (Catherine Keener) wants to make clear it is Arthur; Lee just as urgently wants him to identify as Joker.
Lady Gaga plays Lee, a fellow inmate on her way, we suppose, to becoming Joker’s girlfriend Harley Quinn
For those cinema-goers who consider Joker: Folie a Deux to be just another unnecessary Batman spin-off, you should maybe think again
All this is compellingly directed by Phillips, and superbly acted by Phoenix especially, in a role for which he seems custom-made, but by Gaga too. We’ve known since A Star is Born in 2018 that she can act, but she really is terrific in a bad-girl role. They’d have loved her at St Trinians.
As for those cinema-goers who consider Joker: Folie a Deux to be just another unnecessary Batman spin-off, you should maybe think again.
This might not quite be in the top rank of films about mental illness, alongside all-time greats such as Psycho and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s not too far off.
Joker: Folie a Deux opens in the UK on October 4, 2024.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
