The Australian filmmaker takes hold with force effects and narrative extravagance of the legend of the singer who died in 1977.
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Nine years after his adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby the Magnificent, presented at the opening of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, the Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann (Moulin-Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) is back on the Croisette with Elvis, an excessive and psychedelic feature film whose course covers just over three decades. What is needed to tell the ascent, decadence and the fall of a king. Either the route of a frail and poor little boy of Mississippi, born in 1935 and named Elvis Aaron Presley (Austin Butler) who will become one of the most adored rock stars during his lifetime, to date; and whose date of death, August 16, 1977 in Memphis, in Tennessee, remains unwaveringly engraved in the unconscious of America.
The King, who had the girls sworn and shocked the parents with his suggestive swaying, joined the Pantheon of American icons screen printed by Andy Warhol. The legend has erected as a monument, which Baz Luhrmann takes care of sending to the throne fair, to offer a kind of “biggest spectacle in the world”. Because the director had never gone so far in delirium, aesthetic escalation and narrative extravagance as in this sixth feature film which seems to demonstrate everything that cinema is able to do and (re) to present. Cirque and rides, reconstruction of extracts from films in which Presley played, comics (of which he imagined being the hero) and archive images, musical sequences and (rarely) intimate, places and eras … follow one another Mix and often coexist by the magic of the split screen (divided screen that can accommodate several images), to the point that we sometimes no longer know where to look.
Elvis delivers a show saturated with sounds and images, puts full eyes and ears, makes you dizzy until dizziness. And this, from the first minutes of the film which transport us to the Circassian universe of puppets, acrobats and creatures of all kinds. Middle where the professional career of Andreas Cornelis Van Kuijk, alias “Colonel Parker”, started with an uncompromising but end of the late limit. Who, below his marquee, hears the voice of Elvis and makes him his destiny. Leaving his job as a barnum at the Grand Barnum to become both the mentor, the substitution father and especially the singer of the singer. It was by this guy, that we accused of all the evils – in particular of having stolen and trained the King at the forfeiture – that Baz Luhrmann leads his story.
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