I’m referring to her recent interview for Esquire, in which she admitted that she loves “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Tenant” by Roman Polanski“I accept that someone bad was involved in something good,” she added, thus striking at the very essence of cancel culture, whose biggest hunwejbins want to delete not only artists who have minor or major sins on their conscience, but also their works. The actress and director is the daughter of Lenny’Kravitz’s ego. She grew up in the heart of show business and knows its bright and dark sides well. She is“Blink twice”.
Tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) makes a self-criticism. He publicly apologizes for his inappropriate behavior towards women and the world. He promises improvement and a total transformation. He has a place to do it as the owner of a private paradise island. The parties on it were legendary, but today King apparently prefers to be the king of peace and harmony with the world. At one of his banquets he meets two waitresses – Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat). The first one in particular is fascinated by the charming and handsome billionaire with a captivating gaze. Slater invites girls from a social class so far removed from his own to an island. The prince from Big Tech drags Cinderella out of the banquet and puts her on a private jet.
What could possibly go wrong? Frida and Jess find themselves in the middle of a world they’ve only read about in glamour magazines. Fancy meals, champagne flowing from dawn, expensive perfumes delivered to your bed every morning, and nightly parties with the best drinks and mysterious drugs. “Are you having a good time?” King asks every now and then, who is becoming increasingly fascinating to Frida. And not only her. The late celebrity Sarah (Adria Arjona), jealous of a girl from the lower classes. There has to be a bad princess in every fairy tale, right? Jess slowly begins to notice that something sinister and evil lurks behind the perpetual smiles of King and his buddies (Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, Simon Rex, Levon Hawke), which the other happily intoxicated women do not want to see (Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen) invited to the island. Here I will stop in the description so as not to spoil your fun.
The pieces are laid out so clearly that you can quickly read the clues that Kravitz and his co-writer ET Feigenbaum are leading us down. A handsome billionaire who is beguiling the whole world with a woman helping him (Geena Davis), an island and romantic-drug parties behind the facade of which there is a crime? Jeffrey Epstein and his island, called the Island of Sins, bow here in the waist. Kravitz plays safe cards, showing millionaires as degenerate psychopaths, which in the era of cinema exploiting the theme of class divisions is already basically hackneyed. He does it from the position of a nepo woman, raised in the world of glitz and celebrities, so if only because of the need to make himself credible, he intensifies and emphasizes the pattern of “noble man from the working class vs. degenerate with dollars instead of a soul”.
Kravitz has trouble finding the right rhythm for a thriller that has too much exposition in the first act. We quickly figure out that the paradise island is poisoned not only by the venom of snakes carried in the hands of the natives (Maria Elena Olivares fits the Indian visions of Mickey and Mallory from “Natural Born Killers,” although Jim Morrison’s peyote dance would do just fine) and we really don’t need any more signs from the scriptwriters. This game of stalking is too long! But when the film finally gets out of the mix “Run!” Jordan Peele / “Don’t worry honey” Olivia Wilde and a module appears with the inscription “Promising Young Waitress”, the story enters a good course and path. It does not lead us to any new areas, but anyone who likes cinema about women’s revenge will feel satisfied.
Tatum (Kravitz’s life partner) delivers one of the best performances of his career. He is alternately sweet and charming, demonic and bestial. It is easy to believe in his lack of empathy, which is not something that the brilliant demiurges of Silicon Valley are particularly highly charged with. Sometimes watching interviews with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos gives me goosebumps. King is terrifying because you can see with the naked eye the seams on the mask of a gentleman, hiding a sociopath and probably a genius, since he made his billions in the Big Tech industry. I buy this image more than Adam McKay’s over the top Mark Rylance in Don’t Look Up.
It’s a pity, however, that the galaxy of talented stars is not better used. While Adria Arjona proves that her magnetism from “Hit Man” is not accidental, Naomi Ackie carries many scenes on her shoulders, Geena Davis is convincing as a version of Ghislane Maxwell (sentenced to 20 for helping Epstein), the talent of Simon Rex known from the fantastic “Red Rocket” and Christian Slater, who clowns instead of acting, is completely underused. Similarly, the bizarre figure of the psychotherapist, with a face lost on the set almost as much as in the red room in Twin Peaks by Kyle MacLachan, who was probably hired only to make the film’s poster look even more impressive.
“Blink Twice” is a stylishly photographed film. by Adam Newport-Berra, has a good soundtrack (the director is a singer and the daughter of Lenny himself, so that’s no surprise) and a quite inventive finale, which, despite the fact that it falls apart here and there, proves that Kravitz is an intelligent director and is looking for a way to find unconventional plot solutions. Besides, the cinema of women’s revenge on Epstein’s island and the simultaneous defense of Polanski’s work prove that Zoe Kravitz likes perversity. He knows that bad people sometimes do good, and yet it is the complexity of the villains in thrillers that is their most interesting part.
6/10
“Blink twice” (Blink Twice), dir. Zoe KravitzUSA 2024, distributor: Warner Bros., theatrical release: August 23, 2024.