Joker: Folie à Deux (redux)
“still life, with gooseberry” Vol.6
Despite a long list of films during 2024 being more accomplished and pleasing on the eye (Poor Things, Spaceman, The Holdovers, All Of Us Strangers, Monkey Man, Kinds of Kindness, The Substance, The Outrun, Longlegs, Heretic and Small Things Like These…I could go on…) I simply couldn’t resist including Joker: Folie à Deux within my eleventh and latest self-published book entitled “still life, with gooseberry” as, despite the ridiculous and expected criticism, there’s a beautiful love story being told here and I’m an old romantic at heart, and who doesn’t want to see Lady Gaga smiling as she sings the hits of The Carpenters?
So you’ll find the following spoiler free appraisal also moonlighting as the very first chapter of a dirty dozen for the month of November within the self-published book linked below and, as I’m an old romantic, I’ve also reposted my article in full. The book? Free to read on Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” and also reasonably priced in hardback and paperback if you would be so kind as to consider supporting an indie author.
Thanks.
"still life, with gooseberry" - link to Amazon
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
A prison klaxon sounds as the camera settles on the smiling angel eagerly awaiting the bitter and broken man to sit on the opposite side of the glass partition. He sits quietly with a slight smirk of recognition. The colour palette of the scene…
A prison klaxon sounds as the camera settles on the smiling angel eagerly awaiting the bitter and broken man to sit on the opposite side of the glass partition. He sits quietly with a slight smirk of recognition. The colour palette of the scene is yellow and a dirty prison green.
“How are you holding up” our angel asks as the camera once more settles upon her, constantly in elongated close-up and after a chuckling smile from her beau, her reflection is always seen in the glass separating our would-be lovers. The angle returns back to our blonde haired angel as with a worried look on her face she asks if the grizzled, skeletal man sitting opposite her is okay. He lights a cigarette as the camera angle returns to him, our angel now larger in the glass reflection. A beat or two passes before he stumbles a somewhat whispered question:
“Did you lie to me?”
Full on camera angles now continue, quickly edited between the two as our angel laughs and “everybody lies a little” to the prison inmate opposite who interrogates her and questions her background and motive, words twisted from the mouth of his lawyer, words of caution now turned into accusatory questions. The angel doesn’t deny the validity of the questions being posed and responds with yet another smile and “I just wanted you to like me”. Drawing on his cigarette and despite the smiles from across the glass partition, the questions continue, questions from a man who cannot believe someone as beautiful as this is in his life, someone who wants to love and be with him. Still the questions persist. Still the smiles in response from an angel if not on his shoulder, but directly in his eye line.
The verbal back and forth continues between the two lovers, jovial now as the man cannot believe the angel opposite him cheated the very system that now keeps them apart, just to meet the man who gave her a reason to live and breathe again. He laughs now, “you could have just wrote me a letter” to which the angel (again in full, elongated close up) exclaims she’s “nobody” and “I haven’t done anything with my life like you have”. Drawing again on his cigarette the man, warming now to the conversation and the beautiful angel opposite him, asks if she told the truth about watching the TV special on him and for the first time, the camera lingers on him for her sincere and positive response of “It was great”, but this is still not enough to sate his paranoiac appetite:
“My lawyer says you’re playing me for a fool”.
For the first time in this short scene the camera angle now changes to a wider shot of the two lovers separated by the prison glass within the confines of their dull yellow/green surroundings. The close-up angles resume quickly, a man forever looking downward and only up toward his lover for his brief, stilted and almost whisper-like questions, an angel opposite in mirrored reflection or full close-up now turning the questions back on the smoking man, of his lawyer and a larger outside world laughing at him, but not in the way he so desires. He’s being played for a fool by others she exclaims, not her, not this angel who yearns for the man opposite her and the life she’s preparing for him in the outside world.
“I’m pregnant” she deadpans, lighting a cigarette.
As the man opposite struggles to comprehend the simple statement he’s just heard, beats pass but not the angle of the camera as he remains front and centre as the angel opposite begins singing (They Long to Be) Close to You by The Carpenters. Seen first again in the reflection of the prison glass, the singing angel is now in close-up as the song builds before the repeating pattern of camera angles throughout the scene continues but now, with the camera on full close-up of the man he is seen faintly smiling before a full close-up on his angel shows her responding to his warmth, her singing louder and through beaming smiles. She tilts her head slightly and lovingly at her man as she ends the first verse with “They long to be, close to you”.
He stumbles a question “Really?” as to her pregnancy but his angel ignores him and in full close up and for the man she adores:
“On the day that you were born, the Angels got together. And decided to make a dream come true. So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold, and starlight in your eyes of blue”
An ever broadening smile appears on the man as the camera angle changes for a third major time and now a wider shot of the two lovers as the angel rises to her feet triumphantly in line with the song, and a second verse whereby the man gently, again almost in a whisper, sings along with the golden haired songbird opposite him. Resuming her seat, the angel draws a smile with her lipstick on the glass separating them before the man places his face against the red line, the broadest smile of all now in line with the lipstick mark before him.
We cut to the man dancing in his prison cell, cigarette smoke drifting upward as he twists and contorts his skeletal frame in the dance of the Joker, mournful strings now replacing the singing of an angel.
The above short scene arrives at exactly the halfway point of Joker: Folie à Deux, is arguably the high watermark for the film and where this particular joker sobbed his heart out. Not just once during my first watch two nights ago. Not only twice during a beautiful second watch with my equally beautiful son yesterday. But a third time too today before compiling these rambling musings on a film that is far, far better than many so called “experts” or “reviewers” would have you believe.
It’s unremitting and unapologetically grim, shown in its full context as Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) descends into his maniacal laugh during a rainstorm in the prison grounds when he’s all alone, his laughter cascading with the rain into a guttural howl of despair. The brightly suited persona of The Joker in the 2019 original film returns, you’d expect nothing less, but here Arthur’s struggles from the first film are magnified, caged in an abusive system, the skeletal remains of a man and psychopathic killer on trial for a life he wished was over long ago. Until that is he meets the angel of his dreams, and a beautiful fucking love story fit for their, and our, upside down world.
The angel in question may have many faces but Lady Gaga as Harleen/Lee Quinzel is a quite remarkable presence in this film as she showcases the acting chops I’ve seen in all five of her big screen appearances to date and especially so in A Star is Born in 2018 and 2021’s House of Gucci. Director Todd Phillip’s camera, deliberate or not but almost certainly so, lingers on his leading lady and the Joker’s angel constantly, authenticating a performance of grace and devilry, love and desire. She may have more faces than Gotham DA Harvey Dent and deliberately so one may argue, but the actress beneath them all is outstanding in an astonishing performance.
I could ramble on, again, with my love for all things Joaquin Phoenix or dive a little deeper into a film whereby his character here is all skin and bones, a skeletal and aged faded star in his own fantasy world, an agent of chaos in a real world he has long since said goodbye to as eventually or even immediately, he’ll hurt and destroy those closest to him. Or I could elucidate my longer thoughts on a film that whilst it’s not as polished and near perfect as the original is still a remarkable film between the cartoons that begin and end this odyssey into the outside world of outsiders, anti-heroes for an underclass left behind. I could also bemoan *that* ending and an ending we as an audience didn’t deserve.
But this is an ugly, twisted love story above all else, that first sighting in Arkham Asylum before a later meeting between the two lovers and a daring escape brings a crashing reality back into their dark lives lightened by the flames of a fire that backgrounds their first kiss before their first dance by moonlight and a prison scene that cements their love long before their love is truly sealed mid-way through the film.
The lovers are gonna build a mountain “from a little hill”, and this old romantic hopes they make it to the top.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.