Joker: Folie a Deux review - an assault on your senses

Joker: Folie a Deux review - an assault on your senses

What:  Folie a Deux - Travails of the deranged, delusional minds cause an assault on your senses

Before watching Joker, I didn’t know the meaning of Folie a Deux. I googled it after the show concluded. Rightly termed, this means a rare psychiatric condition where a delusional belief is shared by two or more people, usually in a close relationship. In this film, Joker and Harley share their madness and also share their sadness.

I was expecting that the sequel to the 2019 classic by Todd Phillips would be a deeper exploration of its disturbed and lunatic protagonist, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), but it turned out to be a bizarre, convoluted and unending assault fashioned as a marauding musical.

Fleck's predicament coupled with the fascinating symphonic synchrony with his muse, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) and the trials at the court of law could be an intriguing chapter in Joker's dossier but it is marred by the heightened self-indulgence, complacency and audacity of Philips to take his audience for granted.

 ‘Joker Folie a Deux’ sees the failed comedian and deeply troubled Arthur institutionalized in Gotham city’s Arkham State Hospital, awaiting a trial for the five murders he committed, including the three bullies who had accosted him at a subway station and the popular talk show host Murray Franklin on national television.  “Its six”, he secretly tells her fellow inmate and soulmate, Harley, “I killed my mom, too!”

The first sight of Arthur is rather a very pensive one. Freckled, skinny and almost as a skeleton without even an ounce of flesh on his naked body. He is dragged for a bath and shave by the ruthless cops who snoot at him, “Hey Arthur, do you have a joke for us today!” There is a sense of solace on his face when it gets showered with the rain drops falling from the sky. Phillips establishes morose and melancholy with the solitude imposed on the prison inmate. 

Joker unfolds as a poignant ballad, highlighting the romantic escapades of Joker and Harley (whom I first thought as figment of Arthur’s imagination) and the subsequent trials where the clown with the murderous frown is revered as a hero by the public much to the dismay of the Judge and DA, Harvey Dent, played by Harry Lawtey (a connection with the DC universe spotted!). Philips arrests our attention with spectacular and superfluous cinematography (Lawrence Sher) capturing Gotham in the dawn and dusk hours with a consistently sombre background music underlying the inner tumult of the characters. Sparks of his cinematic intellect also dwell in the dichotomy that he crafts in the courtroom with a flourishing and regaling Arthur in contrast to the ravaged soul brutalized with sodomy.

 But the thread-bare plot, its meandering narrative and the dull-n-dreary storytelling was an assault on my senses, notwithstanding the terrific Joaquin Phoenix reprising the pseudobulbar syndrome with brooding, sullen eyes that speak volumes about his suffering and struggle with duality. Apart from the physical transformation which exposes his bulging spine and projecting shoulder bones, Phoenix masterfully adorns Joker with a contained grudge, grimace and a striking gladness after finding a companion in Harley. Not in comparison to Margot Robbie, but Gaga’s Harley is incomplete, incompetent and insufferable as the women orchestrating a groundswell in support of Fleck.

 

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