UThe secret is foreversays the subtitle of TheDrama. But to work, the film must reveal this secret immediately, twenty minutes after the opening credits (which however arrive in pure indie-cool style after the first meeting between Zendaya/Emma and Charlie/Robert Pattinson). So what can we do and put a nice spoiler here too? A dilemma that seems superfluous amid the foreign controversies that have erupted over the invention of Emma Unite’s black past to recent Italian school news events (in any case you can read it at the bottom of the page).
Written and directed by Kristoffer BorgliNorwegian director on his second American film after Dream Scenario, TheDrama it is, in Zendaya’s divinistic construction, the most authorial chapter in a career as a former Disney star who has already collected authorship Denis Villeneuve, Guadagnino and the “pygmalion” Sam Levinson (it won her two Emmys for Euphoria). At the same time, for Borgli, it is his least powerful film after the boom of Sick of myself.
One in which, still under protection freak of the Square Peg of Ari Asterthe effect of the supposedly sensational broadside appears strangely limited. You laugh a little, you suffer a little more, you turn up your nose, but little remains on you. And if on the wedding scene the mind goes to Melancholia by Lars von Trierit is because the matter of TheDrama has the typical characteristics of Nordic cinema as they have diluted from Dogma onwards. So the sensation is that of the compendium arty serving two stars (with Pattinson, the part that has to work out the secret, who stands out without however excelling over Zendaya).
Zendaya in “The Drama”. (The Wonder Pictures)
The Drama – A secret is foreverplot and review
Emma and Charlie meet in a cafe. She is reading a book and has her back to him. When he gets up for a refill, he takes the opportunity to glance at the title, so as to have a hook to start a conversation. Emma doesn’t turn around though, it turns out she’s deaf in one ear (in the other he has an earphone). A detail that immediately casts a strange light on her: Is semi-deafness really the result of a high fever?
Finally, Charlie’s presence has been intercepted, Emma suggests “starting over” with introductions. From there, and despite Charlie’s lie about the book (he hadn’t read it), a couple is born. The wedding preparations are not long in coming. There are rehearsals with a choreographer, there is the speech for Emma that Charlie writes and rewrites and of which he reads some parts to his friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie). And there’s a DJ hired and caught (perhaps) snorting cocaine on the street (what to do, keep it or dump it?).
And there is the fateful little game that, during dinner to set the menu for the ceremony, it turns everything upside down, preparations and personal and interpersonal relationships: what is the most horrible thing you have done in your life? Emma, who of the four-person table, she’s the one who hasn’t even done the shameful deed, just prepared, it ends up being the worst person in the world.
The friend Rachel (Alana Haim) – which reveals about having locked a mentally retarded child in the closet of a camper in the middle of the woods for a night – he deletes it instantly (he has biographical reasons). While Charlie begins to question who he is marrying. A crazy woman, a deranged woman, a mythomaniac, someone who could return to the same instincts of violence. Emma explains who she was at the time, and what led her to plan revenge. However, nothing can change the negative image that has fallen upon her. At the wedding, Charlie’s speech, trashed but inadvertently requested, becomes one stumble after another. But for him there is an even more embarrassing outcome.
A more effective press campaign than the film
Maybe it’s because Emma’s secret is something that for us Europeans is all-American madness (only to end up finding it in Norway), or maybe it’s because Charlie (in the film an Englishman, therefore a foreign observer) it blunts its gravity compared to the child locked in the closetbut The drama it remains a substantially static film in comparison to the dark and romance promise of the advertising campaign. Che remains the best part of a story that promised much more discomfort, intrigue, surprises.
Nevertheless, despite this absence of radicality – after all, a different hand was needed to make one feel a certain ethical tangle, in the light of their respective pettiness, of eliminating the DJ girl without knowing whether she was on drugs or not –, TheDrama It has its own precise cohesion. A mix of rom-com and psychosis, it is a variation on the always hot theme of marriage and identity. A neo-bourgeois transgression with which to spend an evening at the cinema, experiencing a certain thrill. In this sense, the ironic disassembly of every annoyance is authentic. For example, the funny tone – inevitably the subject of criticism – applied to the flashbacks of Zendaya as a child who was first oppressed and then a strategist.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in “The Drama”. (The Wonder Pictures)
Moral: 27 years later Eyes wide shut, the couple’s eyes are still something «wide open closed». The only solution is to give yourself a second, third, fourth chance. With new masks and new desires. And since in 27 years the world has changed a lot, instead of tell each other to fuck more like Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Emma and Charlie «let’s start again» from the beginning. After all, adult cinema no longer exists, also in the consistency of its stars.
Despite being roughly the same age as Tom and Nicole in 1999Zendaya and Robert in fact have the disarming appearance of teenagers with two tenths of the charisma of their colleagues. Almost a plastic representation of the blocked growth of our times, in which TheDrama (left in English) has an immediate understanding what social formula that stands for crisis context amended of the bloodiest parts. That is, not a real drama. Something to make you think a little, to engage.
Spoilers, what is the secret of TheDrama
So what did Emma do? He planned a massacre at his school of partly white bullies. She then trained to shoot with her father’s rifle (the recoil from the first shot of her life is what makes her deaf). With uniform and cane in hand (and map on the wall on the terrorist route to follow), also try to record the classic video in which the massacres explain the reasons for the massacre. He will change his opinion, going from homicidal rage to the opposite extreme: peace activist and gun controlgaining in notoriety.
