“Joker: Folie à Deux”: The World Needs Love

The most human, fascinating, and moving killer clown in superhero and villain cinema has just passed through the Venice Film Festival. The character has transcended the comic book universe to become a cinematic effigy of the flaws of a society that allows some types of violence and is shocked by others. We have again Joaquin Phoenix, Oscar winner in 2020, pathetic and shocking, delivered to the abyss of the inner demons of manic-depression with his hysterical laughter and his grimaces unhinged. Joker won the Golden Lion in 2019, but this second installment of Todd Phillips has gone unnoticed in the palmarès the 81st edition. It will arrive in Spanish theaters on October 4.

Joker: Folie à Deux opens with a colorful 2D animation summarizing the first film. The splashes of blood eventually stain the entire screen and transform into the crimson curtains leading into the second feature. Arthur Fleck now finds himself in a bleak correctional facility where the inmates are kept on medication. He is awaiting trial for the murder of five people. The court proceedings will determine whether he will receive the death penalty or an alternative sentence, should the verdict find that he acted in a state of insanity resulting from psychiatric illness. His card up his sleeve is to dissociate himself from the Joker (responsible for the murders) and convince the jury that he is now none other than Arthur Fleck.

That cold and leaden prison is perhaps no more so than the world that Fleck’s alter ego gestated, although he seems to have found a certain balance in the routine (and the pills). But one day, a glance revolutionizes everything. An intern watches him walk by with incandescent interest from choir class. Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) has just opened a door to his heart. Very different in style from the Joker’s scorned girlfriend played by Margot Robbie in that Pantagruel feast of explosive parties, sledgehammers, and flying kicks that was Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, both, bad as they are, are very good at what they do. The two creations share the preciousness of violence, albeit with very different tastes.

Arthur gives himself body and soul to the attraction, the dazzling flashes of love, the euphoria of passion. And for once in his life, an unusual desire to live and sing blossoms within him, so much so that his gray existence succumbs to the reverie of the musical. Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix form a couple of nuts (for each other) that fit like the mechanism of a time bomb that lacks that precise screw.

Colorful and chiaroscuro, the urban nocturnality and the diffuse neon tones that rhyme with the clown’s makeup (and with that of the lights of the police cars) retain the same visual stylization as the previous one, again at the hands of cinematographer Lawrence Sher. Its image remains addictive and hypnotic. A flush of color that drowns in the underworld of madness.

The sequel is a coherent continuation of the spirit of its predecessor, even if it cannot produce the same shock that was the discovery of the initial one. If the theme of Todd Phillips’ first Joker was the sickness of a system that marginalizes the misfits, the theme of this second installment experiments with that antidote we call love. But what if you fall in love with the monster inside you and love itself destroys that monster?