UA young woman (Dylan Penn) grows up in the shadow of a father flamboyant (Sean Penn). She loves him and admires him. And she doesn’t stop doing it even when he finds out he is an illusionist, a snake charmer. So far the overlap between life (and relative feelings) and fiction (and staged feelings) is practically total.
Dylan Penn and Katheryn Winnick in Flag Day.
Plans diverge on the nature of the enchantment. On one side Sean Penn, gigantic actor and, as a director, continuer of the New Hollywood tradition, which saw the birth, at the end of the sixties on the ruins of the great studios and in the aftermath of the political turmoil that had shaken America, a movement which we still look at today with desire and emotion. On the other, John Vogel, the protagonist of A life on the runa film that we saw in Cannes and that has been in our cinemas for a few days. In English there is a term, with artist, to define types like John Vogel. And it is no coincidence that the expression – to be translated as scammer – has the idea of an artistic performance at its heart. John Vogel was a matriculated liar, a forger, a bank robber, but we’d swear the list was longer on his criminal record. John Vogel, judging from how the film tells us, was above all a seducer. His story was told by his daughter, Jennifer Vogel, the most grieving on the long list of scammers.in a book, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life, ie “The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life”. Which then became a screenplay. And that, years ago, was proposed by Sean Penn to his daughter Dylan.
Sean’s trolley
The reason, very simple, nepotism aside, is that “when I read it I always had Dylan in my head, his face, the talent my daughter has for conveying the truth” declared the director. In the complex game of mirrors between life-book-film-life weaves around A life on the run and to the many figures involved, truth and lies are key words. Think of Sean Penn, of his latest exploits: Ukraine, the image of him with the trolley mixed with the first caravans of refugees fleeing to Poland, then the return in Lviv, together with the NGO Core of which he is co-founder. And look at Dylan Penn, now in his thirties, 15 years after that first paternal proposal (“to whom I said no, I could not imagine myself an actress then, the work my mother and father did seemed a bit ridiculous”), the expensive, impossible-heeled sandals untied, the loose hairstyle at the end of a day of interviews, and you think that message in a bottle, delivered by the father when his daughter was little more than a teenager, had an effect.
Dylan Penn with his father Sean in Flag Day.
An actress was certainly born (“I can’t wait to work, I would do anything for a role”) and, strangely for those who choose that profession, she is someone who really has a good relationship with the truth: “I’ve done dozens of auditions and I’ve been rejected for dozens of times”. If Jennifer Vogel had to become the opposite of her father (a journalist, the profession of those who work with reality) to free herself from a childhood that would have spread a mammoth, Dylan – finally deciding not to send the letter back to the sender. love her father sent her – she says she understood that making that film, in which Sean Penn directs her and himself, meant accepting the fact “that my dad finally sees me for who I am.”
The scene within the scene
When he talks about him, the expression is always «my dad», more «dad» than «father». The story of a scene within the scene during filming is already inscribed in the legend: Dylan-Jennifer is interviewing a person in a club, behind the interviewee the TV shows a chase that takes place live. The police hunt down the car in which his father escapes after clumsily carrying out a robbery. The car swerves, it’s over, he takes a gun and points it to the temple. Dylan cries. And Sean, who is inside the TV screen in the bar, but also behind the camera that Dylan films, cries too.at the sight of her daughter’s tears. Wanting to cut things with her hatchet, how much of her was her father and how much of her character in front of her at that moment? Her answer is sure and she says a lot: “My father, 80 percent.” There is no need to theorize, stepping on the pedal of feelings: you can see how Sean takes Dylan back – traveling along the streets of an America deprived of his dreams, accompanying the escape of this girl left alone, with a mother who drinks too much and repeating: “Your father is a liar”, with the music of his friend Eddie Vebber – to understand that, as her mother, Robin Wright, of whom Dylan is the copy, revealed to her, “working under Sean’s direction was the best experience of life.”
Flag day, the original title of the Sean Penn film.
Dylan confirms: “Even though we’ve never had a relationship as difficult as the one between Jennifer and John Vogel, the two of us we really had a cathartic moment with this film, and my dad was very good at creating a safe space in which everyone, but especially me, could afford to be vulnerable. I think he understood that I was willing to enter with all of myself in that dark place … I got completely naked“. Not irrelevant, in the “safe space” with her was also her younger brother, Hopper, who when asked, “What strategy did your father use to propose the role of Nick?”, Prosaically replied: “He told me “.
A ridiculous job
Dylan Penn, the little girl who thought her parents and the rest of the Hollywood circus did a bit of a ridiculous job, now says she wants to be in that circus. «I want to write, I’m working on a TV seriesbut I’m not sure if I want to act in a movie I wrote, maybe it’s too much. I see my parents, there is an element of self-inflicted torture in what they do. And I hope there is directing in my future ». Multitasking: just like his father, his paternal grandfather, Leo Penn (whom Sean, as a child, joined in an episode of House on the prairie«Little more than a pocket money»), and to his mother, a new actress and director in 2021 with Land.
Sean Penn in A Life on the Run.
The obsession with success, and the fear of failure, which devoured John Vogel, cannot be his: «It is the most American fear of all, that of not making it in life. John Vogel had high expectations for himself, he wanted the American dream and thought he deserved it. It took many shortcuts to get there and failed on a regular basis. He felt he was promised to a different destiny ». Dylan’s fate is open: Hollywood Royal, but raised far from Hollywood, in Marin, north of San Francisco, “an area of rich hippies”, he absorbed the mythology in small doses: first by visiting his father’s sets when she was already old enough to have a crush on Emile Hirsch (the protagonist of Into the Wild), see in the cradle Olive Vedder, daughter of Eddie and today, seventeen, singer also in A life on the runwork as a bartender, deliver pizzas, drink too much, join a program to stop drinking, being a model (And would you like to return to the catwalks? “Not at all”)working for a photo agency, (“I spent two and a half months looking for photos of roses to match Natalie Portman’s face for the perfume commercial. And I realized I didn’t give a damn”).
Dancing to the tune of Night Moves by Bob Seger as her dad asked her to do for this movie, but it seems in her ropes. “I understood what Jennifer was feeling, I shared hers search for an identity separate from that of his parents, because it wasn’t just her past or her name that defined her. There was a moment when I clearly felt that there was something in there that concerned me and it was something I could do. “
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