Review of "Monster": "Rashomon" and the power of telling your own story

Monster is the first film by Anthony Mandler, a director with significant experience in the world of video clips, who has collaborated with artists such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Jay Z. The film is based on the homonymous novel by Walter Dean Myers and its cast shines exceptionally from its protagonist, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr, to the surprising debut of rapper Asap Rocky, who engages with his overflowing charisma throughout history. The cast is completed by John David Washington, Jennifer Ehle, Jennifer Hudson and Jeffrey Wright.Tell your story to survive Before the internet, the press or any mass media, human beings were already anthropologically attracted to listening and telling stories. In Monster, Steve Harmon has to tell his story if he wants to survive, if he wants to have a future where he can continue recording and photographing his surroundings. Mandler always places us under his perspective, from an intimate side, even at times almost poetic. However, it does not pretend to be an omniscient narrative, rather selective with certain information, handling the story between life as a student who is about to graduate to access the university and the prison and judicial process to which he is subjected. The case is not relevant in the plot, but the trial of the human being is for Mandler, his sequences paying some attention to the game of gazes with which the jury and other characters look at the protagonist. For some a child, for others a student, but a monster for the prosecution.Steve spends the tape recording and portraying other people with his Yashika camera, and it is that desire and perspective of how he sees his inner world that will lead him to tell his own story to escape from a world to which he does not belong. Monster leans on Rashomon from Kurosawa, in which different witnesses tell various versions of what happened in the temple. A classic film that Steve sees in class and that serves as the story to reinforce the basic idea of the film: If you have nothing to tell, others will tell your life for you. Pretending that they know who and how you are, Monster represents a coherent and visually attractive exercise in which form and content go hand in hand in search of the protagonist’s own development. Like the artists he admires, Steve will have to tell his vision and truth to live without the slab of silence. A good film start by Anthony Mandler who sins, like all newcomers, of subordinating the aesthetic to the narrative, tarnishing the honesty of certain fundamental ideas that the film does not finish taking advantage of with the necessary depth.