USA, 2024. Directed by Todd Phillips. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Ken Leung, Jacob Lofland, Steve Coogan. Running time 2h 18‘. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Folie à deux is a shared psychotic disorder, identified in 1877 by French psychiatrists Ernest-Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret, in which a psychotic syndrome is transmitted from one individual to another. The syndrome is usually diagnosed in individuals who live in close contact and intimacy, are socially isolated and have little interaction with other people. It is a disorder most commonly found in women with a slightly above-average IQ who are isolated from their families and have relationships with a dominant psychotic person.
Welcome to the world of Joker: Folie à Deux, the first cine-comic that is also a musical. Its roots lie in the treatises on psychopathology and psychiatry, even before the comic book characters created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger.
The film promises to go beyond the revolution already brought to the canons of comic books in 2019 when director Todd Phillips presented his shocking Joker in Venice, the story of the transformation of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), poor and marginalised, suffering from a pathology that leads him to burst into convulsive, hysterical laughter when under stress, into the famous villain of the comics and Batman films. At the end of that film, Arthur, who dreams of a career as a comedian like his unattainable role model Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), kills Franklin on live television, triggering a violent riot in Gotham City. As his emulators put the city to the sword (in an eerie anticipation of the assault on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021), Arthur, now permanently Joker, is locked up in Arkham Asylum. Joker won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, two Oscars and over 100 awards worldwide, consecrating the cine-comic at the level of pure art. In its sequel, the bar of expectations is set even higher.
It is in Arkham Asylum that the folie à deux unleashes: Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga) is intrigued and attracted to Arthur/Joker, and the two fall madly in love, finding common ground in their shared pathologies (‘I’m nobody. I’ve done everything with my life, like you,’ she tells Arthur). Harleen is thus transformed into the lethal Harley Quinn, while the followers Fleck has gained after his murder on live broadcast set him free, creating the empire of the Clown Prince of Crime.
