Devenir Marilyn

On the surface, we know everything about her. Coveted actress of the studios, sex symbol adulated by all, total star, whose life and career will have been perfectly staged and entirely told, especially by men. But here we are in the twenty-first century, in a time of rereading, of toppled statues, of multiple truths and buried voices that can finally speak up. Marilyn is one of those voices. In contrast to the many films and books that have retraced her life and that have cast a univocal gaze upon her — that of men, of psychoanalysis, of the twentieth century — this film offers to give her back her voice, through the interviews she gave, the books she wrote and the fragments she left behind. For the first time, it will be a matter of understanding how Norma Jeane Baker made the icon Marilyn Monroe. Because Marilyn was not born Marilyn, she became her. To the attentive spectator, she tells here, in the first person, the fascinating detail of this metamorphosis, the result of a young girl’s brilliant intuition, of her ambition, of the imperatives of an era and of the desires of the studio moguls. By combining the lyricism of a historical and chronological narrative line with a range of contemporary images revealing the permanency of the Marilyn myth in our imaginations, the film retraces the trajectory of the icon and tells us, about the tyranny of the beauty diktats imposed on women, the brutality of a system — that of the film industry and the studios — and its perpetuation at the dawn of the 21^st century.