Damien Chazelle was born in 1985 in Providence. The boy is only 33 years old if mathematics is not an opinion, but to date he boasts 2 films such as La La Land and Whiplash, both critically acclaimed, both nominated at the most important awards by the industry and film critics and both protagonists of victories at these festivals and starry nights.
We can safely call him a genius of the cinema.
His fame, his glory was achieved through talent, combined with a healthy passion for cinema that oozes from his films with many tributes and winks at other film geniuses.
It is rare that at 33 years of age one becomes a beacon of world cinematography. Today Chazelle is a landmark and there was great expectation for his new work, once again with Ryan Gosling as the protagonist but with a background and a well-known but complex story to tell.
"First Man" set out to tell the story of the landing of the first man on the moon but it became the opportunity for the American director to tell the man behind this milestone and with him the humanity and obsession that lies behind what we can consider "the greatest leap for humanity to date".
It is likely that this film will also make a massacre of awards in 2019. It would be deserved and inevitable given the film he was able to make. The skill lies in the details and in the details Chazelle has surpassed himself by re-proposing to us that world that in the '60s was characterized, among other things, by the race to "domination" of space between the USSR and the USA. A cold war that was played even if not especially among the stars with the Soviets who were outclassing the Americans from this point of view forcing them to raise more and more the bar in order to win that war especially psychological, especially propaganda.
Chazelle flies to the moon with this film and does so by closing the spaces not opening them as we are used to seeing for films that put the universe at the center.
The spectator witnesses an almost claustrophobic film where astronauts are forced to work in precarious conditions, in small spaceships, in confined spaces and with a technology that was perhaps not yet ready for this great leap.
As always when you try to tell a story based on real facts the difference lies in the style and direction you choose to tell that event.
Chazelle surprises everyone by telling us above all the personal story of Neil Armstrong keeping in the background the great conquest for humanity.
Armstrong's story is a personal drama, a drama that projects him into the abyss of his emotions, into the abyss of his beds, his difficulties and that makes him see the moon as a new beginning, as a vehicle for his fears, his misfortunes, as a therapy for his existential malaise.
This is why the Moon becomes for Armstrong what First Man becomes for Chazelle: an obsession.
Touching the lunar surface will be a way to fight and defeat his demons, to put an end to his pain and finally move on.
The film is an intimate portrait of this great man who brick by brick and against all odds set foot on the moon and came back.
Chazelle shows us everything, scale ships, clocks identical to those that were used, spreadsheets, tests, lessons, trials, failures and he does it with naturalness and rawness projecting us into the nightmare that those astronauts lived.
An impossible challenge against everything and everyone and against all odds that NASA managed to win especially thanks to Armstrong's patience, grace, determination and obsession.
That of that time was an extraordinary feat not only at media level, at propaganda level but above all at human level, especially because the technology did not support the greatness of those deeds.
Great men lost their lives or sacrificed their private lives to reach that summit.
This is why Chazelle's idea of putting men at the center of history and not the enterprise itself is in a sense revolutionary as well as winning.
If Ryan Gosling seems perfect to show the impassiveness in the face of such a glorious destiny to surprise, at least to surprise those who did not know her, it is Claire Foy here called to play the wife of Armstrong.
She is the one to carry on her shoulders the whole emotionality of the film.
A woman constantly frightened, constantly worried but in these 2 emotions she manages to portray a thousand facets.
Micro-expressions that change constantly, eyes that speak during silences, a body that moves in unison with the emotions it wants to convey. He has booked the Oscar statuette, it is difficult for someone to take it away from him.
In First Man the spectator is included in the lunar adventure but for this very reason he suffers together with the protagonists.
The moon landing was not only a unique feat but it was a feat for which man was not and could not be prepared.
How to react to this? How could a wife and children have prepared themselves, react in the face of all this? How would we have reacted?
With fear, bewilderment and a maze of negative emotions mixed with fearfully indescribable emotions in the face of the possible achievement of this goal.
Once again it is men at the center, it is their fixed and lost looks that make all the difference.
First Man is a great film, it is a sought-after cinema made of a superlative, raw direction mixed with a use of the most varied production and post-production techniques that raise the overall quality of a sumptuous film that is not afraid to look small, to look like other masterpieces of the genre.
But as we said at the beginning, greatness is in the details and every single choice Chazelle has made this film immortal, he has made it new, different just as if he had gone to the moon and looked at things from a completely different perspective, realizing a feat that will remain in the annals of cinema just as that Armstrong's foot will remain in the books of human history indelibly through the centuries.
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