Last glimmers for the star

Dying stars often emit flashes of light before they fade away. So it happens that the stars of show business send out the most exhausting and moving flashes just a few metres from the end, presumed or real, and that some directors know how to seize them and exploit them to bring to the big screen the meteor of a human being-actor in a game of mirrors that transforms the film into a masterpiece. In The Wrestler Randy Robinson, king of the ring, twenty years after the peak of his success, still retains the splinter of sublime, rough and intense, that made him a champion. Mickey Rourke plays him with a swollen, weathered face, a far cry from that of 9 ½ weeks.

Darren Aronofsky shoots Rourke as he accepts in the twilight too thin compensations, signs posters from another era to fans, wears threadbare clothes. The actor enters the character with muscles bulging with steroids, mindful of victories and fantasies that send the audience into a frenzy. Aronofsky, a director attracted to extremes (Black Swan, The Whale), wanted Rourke because of his past as a former professional boxer, the skill with which he moves in the ring and the similar life trajectories of Randy. From his rise with the gloves and on the big screen to the abyss of drugs and alcoholism. And, finally, the unexpected turn towards the firmament with a new, thinner, more painful, even truer skin. In Birdman, actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), artistically dead after parting with the eponymous superhero he played, continues to be haunted by his ghosts. Thomson tries to change his ways by acting on Broadway in a play and Alejandro Iñárritu with an ingenious use of the sequence plan transforms Keaton, actor within an actor, into a supernova that will gem other heavenly bodies. In Birdman, as in The Wrestler, there is an abandoned daughter to be reclaimed when the light of fame still sends out faint flashes. Similarly to Aronofsky with Rourke, Iñárritu plays on the truth-finition double-bind, as Michael Keaton was Batman for Tim Burton in two films dedicated to the Batman.

These are the same footsteps left by Billy Wilder, who on The Sunset Boulevard wanted the return (triumphant, so in the credits) to the big screen of silent film diva Gloria Swanson as silent film actress Norma Desmond. Norma, gone on the set, still shines in her home kingdom. What was extinguished on the set, still shines for Max von Mayerling, Norma's ex-husband and former director, played by Erich von Stroheim - also a filmmaker in reality -, who no longer directs her but acts as her butler and chauffeur. The villa in which Norma lives still holds the energy that made her immortal, protecting her from the rejection that Hollywood reserves for divas of her age. Swanson was 50 years old when she made Billy Wilder's film and in the film she declares the same age as 'unforgivable' then for the scenes. Not surprisingly, Greta Garbo had retired to private life at the age of 36 to spare herself the cruelty of resultant parts. Norma, on the other hand, still fights: she goes to the studios, convinced she has to shoot a new film, and defies destiny for a young love. Before ending up in the dust, she descends, as a diva, the last staircase in the glare of the flashes of photographers no longer of costume, but of crime news.

Margo Channing, Broadway's best-loved actress, on the other hand, predicts her delirium at the age of forty, an age she has already reached. Eva vs. Eva recounts the entrance of the talented and underground young Eva Harrington (Anne Baxter) before the seduced and then furious eyes of Bette Davis. Like Wilder in Sunset's Path with Joe Gillis (William Holden), Joseph L. Mankiewicz introduces a character who incorporates the epiphany of the end, of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Margo's last fireworks are not so much on stage as in the dramas and resurrections acted only for intimates. Eva is the tragic realisation of the oblivion imposed by that society. It is curious that Wilder and Mankiewicz's films denounce in the same year, 1950, the ruthlessness of showbiz towards the woman who is no longer a young girl. It was also stigmatised and made grotesque by a controversial and questionable, but strong and courageous film like The substance by Coralie Fargeat. Often, cinema shows us by fishing in reality, the enormous mass of energy that a star produces, and thanks to which she detaches herself from mediocrity, can generate a pathological reverberation in the world of entertainment, which does not dilute the character's magnetism.

Those around the falling or fallen star continue to be subjugated by its extreme nature, even by madness and deviance. Sometimes the scenes with their allure confuse reality and fantasy, create an excess of performance anxiety, an addiction to consent, under which many succumb. The list is long: from Richard Burton to Peter O'Toole, from Heath Ledger to Philip Seymour Hoffman, from Judy Garland to (perhaps) Marilyn Monroe. In Sunset Boulevard Joe Gillis seeing Gloria Swanson says: 'You are Norma Desmond. You were great'. She lifts her chin like a queen and replies: 'I am always big. It is the cinema that has become small'.