Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.One of the early images in Brady Corbet’s striking new film The Brutalist is of the Statue of Liberty turned on her head. In more ways than one, it hints at what is to come: the subversion of conventional aesthetics and a symbolic upending of ideas about the salvation offered by America.Both will become key in the story of Jewish-Hungarian émigré László Tóth, a Modernist architect whom we see arriving in New York and settling in Philadelphia, leaving behind his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) in war-scarred late-1940s Europe. Once Tóth studied at the Bauhaus; now he sleeps in his cousin’s storage closet and shovels coal.An excellent Adrien Brody puts his own architecture — angular visage, impossibly long legs, jutting shoulders — to terrific use as the touchingly humble Tóth. Our thoughts inevitably return to his defining role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) as Władysław Szpilman, of whom Tóth could be a close cousin — even the film’s titles rhyme and resonate with each other.But Corbet’s film (co-written with Mona Fastvold) does not dwell on the past — at least visually. There are no flashbacks to Hungary and the Holocaust, only yearning letters from Erzsébet relayed in voiceover. And yet Tóth’s whole outlook and everything that transpires in America is suffused with the pain and heaviness of what he has survived. (He is a fictional figure, though there are shades of Marcel Breuer.)Here is a man stripped of everything except his prodigious talent and his dignity. Yet he still walks with a purposeful stride and shows real steel when, in the 1950s, he comes into the orbit of wealthy American industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (a marvellously pompous Guy Pearce), whom Tóth will help build his dream project. Mild-mannered by nature, Tóth is as immovable as a slab of concrete when it comes to his daringly austere work. His English vocabulary may be extensive, but one word is missing from it: compromise. (Both Brody and Jones prove linguistically adept, switching convincingly between heavily accented English and occasional Hungarian.)Thus Corbet and Fastvold establish the essential conflict that drives both Tóth and the film: idealism vs pragmatism, the urge to assimilate vs the need to maintain deeply held convictions. This is crystallised in one of the movie’s standout sections — a visit to a vertiginous marble quarry that plays like a dream sequence before curdling into something more sinister, the American dream as woozy hallucination.Like Oppenheimer, The Brutalist is shot in heavily saturated 70mm VistaVision, is accompanied by an imposing score (Daniel Blumberg) and has the epic sweep of history, spanning five decades and clocking in at a mighty 215 minutes. It justifies them. Yes, there are longueurs, but as Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader) and cinematographer Lol Crawley flick from jittery handheld camerawork to languorous, dialogue-heavy scenes, the film finds its own fascinating rhythm.It is the boldest and best film so far at this year’s Venice Film Festival: a life writ large on the screen that deserves such maximalist treatment.★★★★★Festival continues to September 7, labiennale.org
