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The movies about rock stars are like movies about religious figures: there is always someone who says, "This is not Jesus I know! Bohemian Rhapsody a faithful portrait of Freddie Mercury, Queen's extravagant charismatic singer, who died prematurely in 1991, of AIDS-related pneumonia? Does this do justice to his rock prince's legacy? Roll with a range of four octaves? Does this describe his sexuality in a way that is acceptable to all?
Who is qualified to say? In terms of strict cinema, Bohemian Rhapsody It's a bit of a mess. Some of his scenes connect awkwardly, and he hits every disaster beat and triumphs squarely, like a gong. Yet, while it presents many problems that we associate with "bad" movies, it has more irrational energy than many positive films, largely due to the performance of Rami Malek as a brilliant Mercury, as well as as nerve endings and muscle. It is a film about music, fame, love and the brilliant distinction between a confident staging and pride. There are also cats, floating silk kimonos and leather jackets. It's a film for sensualists, not for quality control experts: you know who you are.
Before Freddie Mercury was Freddie Mercury, he was Farrokh "Freddie" Bulsara, born in Zanzibar of Parsi descent; his family came to England at the end of his adolescence. The first scenes of Bohemian Rhapsody, Set in London in the 1970s, show how far young Farrokh was working in this transformation, with a lot of attitude and some tiny jackets from the legendary British Biba shop. The young woman he meets and loves, Mary Austin (played charmingly and vigorously by Lucy Boynton), works there, and she takes pleasure in the dress of velvet and glitter. How could she not? He is so fabulous, strange and beautiful, with his straight hair and his well-known choppers, that no rule of fashion should bind him. In these early scenes, Malek looks more like Prince than Mercury – but even that makes you think about how pop royalty pollinates cross-over, across genres and oceans.
Around the same time, Freddie also insinuated in a group, soon known as Queen. Soon, he and his bandmates, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor (played here by Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy, miraculously resembling their real counterparts), will have international success, "Killer Queen". the film shows them synchronizing their lyrics with the BBC's Top of the Pops song; the visual symphony consists of fake fur, nail polish and rhinestones. In the vision of the film, as in real life, Mercury continually pushes the group to renew itself: we see them recording the strange and ambitious mini-opera "Bohemian Rhapsody", its harmonies stretched across several bands and multiple tracks as thoroughly manicured as possible. the topiary in a French garden. Later, Freddie and his band members will have to defend the song against the unimaginative executive of IME Ray Foster (played, with a gruff twinkle, by Mike Myers). Success is already theirs, but they want more.
Somewhere between these debut and the dazzling finale of the film, a reenactment of the amazing performance of the band Live Aid in 1985 – which, as the film shows us, has hardly taken place – Mercury changed her look, cutting her hair short and lengthening her hair. carefully molded mustache that would become his signature. He has also come to recognize that he is a homosexual, a transition that Malek is not gracefully but realistically navigating, like an astronaut who enters the Earth's atmosphere and finds the journey so bumpy that he hardly survives. .
Bohemian Rhapsody is, as everyone knows now, the typical example of a troubled production that turns several stars (Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Whishaw) and some directors on the way to the screen. The final film is awarded to director Bryan Singer (who has been the subject of multiple allegations of sexual assault), although he was fired from the project in the final weeks of his shoot. His replacement was Dexter Fletcher, who had been selected for the film. direct one of the previous incarnations of the film. The film is now coming to movie theaters, dragging fate like a ghostly shroud. How did this thing succeed? From the start, he had to serve as many masters: the gay community, millions of fans of Queen and Freddie Mercury, all who turn to a biopic rock rock thinking, without saying squarely, "it'll be nil."
But Bohemian Rhapsody do not fear. There is a soul inside and some anxieties too. Malek's leg on the stage, cheeky as a panther, shows us that being Freddie Mercury had to be awesome. But his eyes reveal that it would not have been easy either: Malek's eyes are disarmed to the point of being disoriented, like the windmills used by the hypnotists. Few films explore what can happen when a homosexual man falls in love with a woman – I'm not talking about a fictional and happy conversion story, but about the conversion story, but about the implosion of dreams. romantic. Here, it's as if Malek channeled the deepest secrets of Mercury: his hidden shyness, his sense of isolation, his reluctance to accept his sexuality. Even after the breakup of Freddie and Mary – she recognizes the truth before him – saying, "Freddie, you're gay!" – he insists on wanting her in her life, placing her in an apartment next to hers. luxurious London pad. At night, he looks out the window. When Malek plays the game, it's not a sexual nostalgia, as Freddie feels, but a raw and indefinable loneliness that goes beyond human desire. It's never easy, but there was a time when there were fewer support systems, and we did not have as many words to explain who we liked and why. Malek transmits all of this with his hectic electric intensity. And the sequence in which he learns that he has AIDS is a tranquil wonder.
There is also debauchery and excesses of rock stars in Bohemian Rhapsody, because that's also part of Mercury's story. But the movie ends in its natural place, not with the death of Mercury, but with this spectacular Live Aid reenactment. Malek recites the songs, although in the end we hear an amalgam of the voice of Mercury and that of the Canadian singer Marc Martel, and the sound is beautiful. Malek as Mercury prowl from one end to the other of the scene, his arms waving a storm front around him; this performance is beautifully carnal in its physicality. Equally wonderful is the way the audience moves, in undulating waves, in response to him – as if it were a sea of metal stringers and had magnets at his fingertips. It was the kind of magic that Freddie Mercury could work with a crowd, perfectly captured in this flawed film, which exists almost against all odds. But then, what is rock'n'roll if not a fortuitous error language? Sometimes the curved note, starting as one thing and ending with another, is the one that sounds right.
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