By Nairita Mukherjee: Three hours would be considered too long a runtime for a film. Especially if it is on Netflix or any other streaming site. Still more, if the narrative takes the protagonist - and the audience with it - through an endless purgatory of sexual abuse, physical violence, objectification, exploitation, manipulation, depression, daddy issues, and more. Director Andrew Dominik's Blonde, starring Ana de Armas, is that - gruelling, numbing, endless. And the director wanted it to be just that. With the help of Ana de Armas, Andrew paints Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane), the stuff of America's wet dreams, in the darkest, gloomiest shades in Netflix's Blonde. Where you can see the cakey white makeup on her face crack and expose the tears she hides with generous dabs of powder, tucked away with that flirty mole on the side of her cheek, and that studio light-like smile. Does it get overbearing? Yes. Do you complain? At times, shifting in your seat. Do you eventually surrender to the transferred epithet of the violence you witness your leading lady face? Yes. And in that lies Blonde's success.

Blonde is based on Joyce Carol Oates' novel of the same name. A novel, not an autobiography, which gives the writer, and in due course, the director, a hall pass in dramatising the events that contributed to making and breaking Marilyn Monroe. Many would have a problem with the exaggeration, and that is understandable. The fact that the film shows Marilyn in a threesome with Charlie Chaplin Jr or Cass (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G Robinson Jr or Eddy (Evan Williams), or that it shows President John F Kennedy (without actually naming him) extracting a blowjob out of Marilyn while on a call with his advisors advising him against 'these women' he is always in the news for, will ruffle feathers. But it doesn't take away the brutality this Hollywood icon had to endure - physical and mental.

Watch the trailer of Blonde here:

At the end of the three-hour runtime, you realise Marilyn Monroe is the biggest villain in Blonde and the Frankenstein of the icon's own story. Norma Jeane is a product of an illicit affair. Her father didn't want anything to do with her and therefore abandoned her mother. This pushed her mother into an abyss of depression, where she makes violent attempts to drown her daughter in a bathtub because she was the reason he left her. Vilification and a deeply ingrained daddy issue gave rise to Marilyn Monroe, one who everyone would love, adore and want, but one who would eventually swallow Norma Jeane.

Showbiz wasn't kind to Norma either. From her very first audition where she is sodomised and raped by the producer to the iconic upskirt poster from The Seven Year Itch when she was at the top of her game, Norma Jeane has been wronged by many men, and the patriarchy that oils the machinery of show business. But she has been most wronged by Marilyn Monroe, for whose resurrection, Norma Jeane had to die within, little by little, until she simply withered away. In that, Marilyn's story hits too close home when you think of Silk Smitha and Vidya Balan's portrayal of her in The Dirty Picture. Women who are turned into toys are simply toyed with until they break. You toss the broken pieces in the bin and look for another toy to toy with.

Ana de Armas is the heart and soul of Blonde. She becomes one with Marilyn's sniffles and sobs, blood and tears. Like Ana's Marilyn asks in a scene, 'where does the dream end and the delusion start?', as an audience you ask yourself, where does Ana end and Marilyn start? How beautifully she blends into this Blonde! Credit, of course, to the director too in that.

Andrew shot Blonde in both colour and black-and-white, perhaps as an allegory to the ebb and flow of emotions in Marilyn Monroe's life, apart from it being an obvious hat-tip to the 1950s Hollywood films. The same can be said about the dialogues - the typical singy-songy tone with lines that sound more like little poems - were deliberately put to evoke retro feels. And it works.

To many, the events might feel too dramatic, too imagined and too fake. To them, we'd say, it was never meant to be a biography or a documentary. It is cinema. Allow the drama to take over.

We're going with 4 stars out of 5.

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