The Venice Film Festival starts in just about a month, and one of the biggest premieres it will host is for Joker: Folie à Deux. A new trailer has been released, and I like this one less than I did the first one.
It definitely looks like Folie àDeux IS a musical, with proper song and dance numbers. That’s fine, I can overcome my inherent distaste for musicals just to watch the Joker bros deal with Joker singing and dancing his way through Gotham. And I do like the LOOK of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, but she is being shown as a woman already on a downward spiral when she meets Arthur Fleck/Joker, then she hitches her wagon to his, and they go off the deep end together.
At least, that’s what the trailer is selling. I hope it’s a fakeout, because Harley’s arc is based on the idea that she had a life before Joker, and she has to figure out how to reclaim whatever’s left of it after Joker. If it was another filmmaker, I would be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing something interesting by so fundamentally altering Harley’s narrative, but I just do not trust Todd Phillips to do anything interesting, let alone do it on behalf of a female character.
I’m also increasingly suspicious that a huge chunk of this movie is going to be chalked up to “it was all a dream”, which is always a huge cop-out. Right now it looks like the song and dance numbers are fantasy sequences, and Arthur and Harley’s Sonny & Cher-esque TV show is, too, but maybe so is Arthur grandstanding in court. Given that we’re going in a musical direction here, utilizing fantasy sequences isn’t out of bounds, but I swear if the bulk of this movie turns out to be a dream sequence, I will be mad. It’s just such a cheap way of avoiding building any real meaning or stakes into your narrative (I’m looking at you Twilight: Breaking Dawn).
There’s no question Folie à Deux will be one of the year’s biggest films. Given the success of the first film, there’s a lot of expectations for the sequel. But people are also harder on sequels, because they know what to expect now. The bar has been set. And while I think Joker’s bar is actually pretty low because it’s not really doing anything interesting or fresh—even the aesthetic no longer looks so different after Matt Reeves’ The Batman brought 80s-style grime to Gotham—many people do hold up Joker as one of the best superhero movies ever made. We’ll see how the sequel stacks up.
Here's Gaga out for dinner last night in Paris.
