La última noche de Marilyn
2024 · 15m · Argentina
Directed by Lucia Juana Castroh, Cristian Bidone
Genres: drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, theatrical
Two actresses, one characterised as Helen of Troy and the other as Marilyn Monroe, find themselves locked in a dressing room discussing how to interpret historical characters. Despite their differences, both will discover that they share experiences of male abuse and control that transcend eras and centuries.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two women in a room talking about archetypes sounds like the least subversive premise imaginable—until you realize the film is actually dismantling the mythic distance between Helen and Marilyn, collapsing centuries of 'timeless' female objectification into a single locked conversation. It's a Trojan horse of a setup, and it works.
The film's formal intelligence lies in its deliberate theatrical constraint—two actresses interrogating representation *within* the artifice of representation itself, a meta-textual lineage that traces back through Pirandello and Beckett. The interplay between historical distance and intimate contemporaneity is rigorously considered.
There's a specific moment where the conversation shifts from intellectual sparring to shared trauma, and the directors let the camera go still instead of cutting away—it's a choice that trusts the performers completely and transforms what could have been schematic into something that genuinely aches.