“Review of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon: A Bloody Song of Violence and Genocide in American History”

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Martin “magic” Scorsese, 80 spring like Harrison Ford, who preceded him to the gala screening of the Théâtre Lumière in Cannes, seems to have lost none of his « flow ». With a tear in his eye, on Saturday May 20, this gracious master of war came to collect his share of love and gratitude from an audience of spectators who were killing each other a day before to get a ticket.

Killers of the Flower Moon (“The Moonflower Killers”), his new film, begins, for connoisseurs of American cinema history, as a discreet reminiscence of an earlier title, The Honeymoon Killers (“The Honeymoon Killers”), a legendary film directed in 1970 by Leonard Kastle, adapting to the cinema the misdeeds of the couple of serial killers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck – and that the young Martin Scorsese, then author of a promising first feature filmWho’s That Knocking at My Door), was to direct, before being fired a week later.

Half a century later, “Marty” returns with an envelope of 200 million dollars (185 million euros) allocated by the company Apple, and adapts to the cinema the bestseller of the same name by journalist David Grann published in 2017.

Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of an Indian tribe, the Osage, who, already bled white by the conquest of the West, had seen themselves confined to the arid reservation of Gray Horse in Oklahoma, where it was doubtless hoped see her turn to stone. But the decimated nation finds itself, it appears, on the largest oil field in the United States. There it is, by a clear irony of capitalist history, rolling on gold. Here she is, as well, a victim of mysterious deaths, which will turn out to be serial murders. The case was entrusted in 1921 to the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI), headed by an ambitious young man named Edgar J. Hoover.

bloody gesture song

That is, twenty years later Gangs of New York – butcher’s tableau of the gang war between the “Natives” and the Irish – a new retrospective look at the origin of the United States, a bloody song of gesture of a country undermined by violence in its very constitution, of which Scorsese will be the one of Hollywood’s most convulsed heralds. Let us add here, with regard to the fate of the indigenous nations, the properly genocidal dimension of the conquest of the country and we will understand that Flowers of the Killer Moon is a film that should make you cringe like never before.

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