Film adaptation, Wicked is a dance with witches, reality, and fiction. Distributed by Universal Pictures Italy, in world premiere, it is in theaters from November 21, 2024.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
For Wicked it is certainly a return, after the 2003 Broadway musical, adaptation of the novel Witch – Chronicles from the Kingdom of Oz in Revolt by Gregory Maguire. A sentimental story divided between two colors, emerald green and blonde, an imaginary line of demarcation between Good and Evil.
But what is evil and what is good; who belongs to evil and who does good? Wicked messes up any question and confuses every possible answer, freely opening itself to overlapping suppositions, and insisting against any aesthetic form that could label a precise identity and belonging. Reality and unreality, mystification, and conceptualization within a “destructive” will concerning conventions and beliefs that tend to facilitate social dynamics, accommodated on elitist and empty appearances. A fictionalized story that does not distinguish fragility from courage, but overlaps them, serving on the same tray minds oriented towards different directions. Inclusion through the grace of knowing how to recognize the difference without underlining and bolding that apostrophize duality, but inserting them between the lines of the same speech that between good and evil devise new dimensions.
Wicked: the dance of the witches
In the flesh: Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) are the two protagonists: two friends, whose appearance seems to stigmatize Good and Evil.
Glinda pink, pure, fairy-tale, Elphaba with green and rough skin, but it is an apparent juxtaposition, and the deception is the film's effective debut.
Cinematographically, the reversal of roles for the spectator who lends himself to an improper, inaccurate, transformable interpretation is pure enjoyment; one "plays" in the attempt to prophesy, within clichés, a combination that then turns out to be wrong, limited to an emblematic scheme that will be reversed.
Elphaba will be the true heroine of Wicked, she will be the one to represent kindness, overturn the interpretative reading, resume the contemporary need for an imbalance of values, amplify without any rhetoric the ethical meaning of the entire film, offering the opportunity, unprecedented despite being a re-adaptation, to rummage through the innumerable combinations and opportunities that belong to human beings.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
In Wicked Reality and fantasy access the same portal
The entire film is a clear eulogy to the first Wizard of Oz, which inaugurated a complex cinematic style and used the musical to experiment with new aesthetic approaches from which a real genre was derived that had great popularity. Wicked balances, through a modern translation, two orientations - reality and fantasy - welcoming them from the same portal: Alice in Wonderland but with the complement of technicolor to better define the passage from one world to the other: symbolism of an intimate and territorial alter ego.
In Wicked Elphaba, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, recalls scenes and dialogues from the 1939 Wizard of Oz; complicated relationships, tense family relations, an environment clouded by a questionable and anomalous education; but being born into a bad family does not preclude the possibility of approaching emotional and sentimental processes, freeing oneself from negative models and showing attention, affection, and acceptance towards those who need it. Unlike Glinda, rosy and apparently good, who hides some thorns among her branches. But everything finds its own balance.
If for years the American teen comedy has reserved us exclusion and marginalization, Wicked instead documents the possibility of being close even if far away; it explains it through fantasy, its abstract and cinematically “light” atmosphere, canceling the fight between Good and Evil, breaking down the traditional role of the antagonist and sharing the presence of fantastic creatures, a manifesto of positive values. The ambiguity and the cruelty of class division are wrapped up in childish purity in an attempt to remedy the effects of a harmful use of aesthetic preconception. In Wicked the aesthetic banality of good and evil no longer exists!
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
Wicked: evaluation and conclusion
In a fairytale narrative Wicked creates a network of different combinations; the film story, using an analytical approach, takes the measures of the scenography as if it were an open stage on which the mime theatricality makes fun of the screen making it alive through a particular performative breadth.
Wicked offers materiality to the imagination also through the concept of the musical and the sound that impose themselves between the dialogues giving them the right accent. Jon M. Chu, American director and producer, builds Wicked, through the effects of the colors, the breadth of the images, and the cinematographic performance that advances toward theatrical perspectives. A scenography that breaks the pattern by hypothesizing two chromatic microcosms until they are mixed equally in infinite shades. The structure of the metamorphosis was typical of unreal cinema, stylized by the fantasy of the scene and the fanta-visionary detail of the setting. Wicked, distributed by Universal Pictures Italy, will be released, in the world premiere, on November 21, 2024.
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