The first images of Dakota Johnson as Marilyn Monroe have arrived, and the surprise is not that she looks the part but that the film cares so little about whether she does. The short, Flesh Impact, is directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival to mark what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday.
Gyllenhaal cast two actors as the same woman: Johnson as a young Monroe, and the 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn as an older version of the star, who died at 36. First-look photographs of both were shared by Vanity Fair. Gyllenhaal admitted she hesitated over Johnson at first because she does not obviously resemble Monroe, then talked herself out of the worry. “That’s ridiculous. Who cares?” she said. “I don’t know that anyone even really totally knows what Marilyn looks like, because she’s been so commodified and made into this myth.”
The premise is the interesting part. The 17-minute film imagines what might have happened if Monroe had been given 60 more years, and what kind of work she might make now. Gyllenhaal, who wrote the script, described it as “a mixture of Marilyn and my fantasy of her,” and said it is really about actresses in general and the strange mix of vulnerability and power the job demands.
The festival’s own log line keeps things deliberately cryptic: a mysterious older woman auditions for a play at a small black-box theatre in New York, and as she describes her experience, the truth about her identity starts to surface.
At 17 minutes, this is not a biopic in the usual sense, and that seems to be the point. Rather than another attempt to recreate Monroe frame by frame, Gyllenhaal is using her as a way in to something larger, and casting against the obvious to get there.
