Maestro, by Bradley Cooper
Maestro opens with a quote from Leonard Bernstein, about art, saying:
“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them, and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
An affected way by filmmaker Bradley Cooper of saying “I will portray the protagonist’s contradictions” as if he were doing something extraordinary in relation to Hollywood biopics.
Parenthesis: Well, taking into account films like Bohemian Rhapsody, about Freddie Mercury, and Rocketman, about Elton John, contradiction is perhaps something new…
And just like the initial quote, Maestro is all affected, eloquent, extravagant. From the obvious elaborate tone of the characters’ dialogues, especially Lenny, lecturing about life and art in several moments, or makeup and costumes, executed with a virtuosity that is both shocking and invisible (as Hollywood technique requires); and, in a less flashy field, cinematography work, changing color, grain texture and aspect ratio in order to align Lenny’s life with the technological development of the cinematographic apparatus.
Mainly, Bradley Cooper’s stilted narration. The virtuoso moving shot when young Lenny is called to replace the main conductor, at the beginning of the film. Or the simple moment of a paper airplane thrown through the building, filmed in a very extravagant frame composition. Or even the protagonist’s conversation with Felicia about his “secrets”, with the camera positioned at a distance in the garden, in an over-framing perspective by the plant ornaments, the characters in the background, lost among the many details of the shot, giving the sensation that we are invading the couple’s privacy.
There would be many possible examples… Shots and frames whose meaning is quickly identifiable despite the mannerism of their construction. Bradley Cooper shots as if he were inventing the biographical film, the dramatic narrative or… come on… the entire cinema. When, in fact, he is trying to hide a standard biopic, in which the protagonist is, from beginning to end, a projection of his public persona in private life; the main actor — in this case, Cooper himself — and all the technical paraphernalia are mobilized for a caricatural imitation of this media surface of Bernstein transformed into a character in a great cinematic undertaking. A film, essentially, about salvation through heteronormative love. A work without much more to say about the art other than what was already said in the opening card.
In short, Maestro’s shameless pretension is nothing more than annoyance.
