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Poor Arthur Fleck cannot find a world that understands him, even when he unintentionally moves crowds everywhere. After what happened in the first film, Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) drags his mopey face down the corridors of Arkham, bullied now not by yuppies but by the mean prison led by Officer Sullivan (Brenda Gleeson). Years have passed, but the Joker’s influence only seemed to have grown. There was apparently a TV movie made about his story that the guards don’t let him see; he hopes it’s good. The world of Gotham moved on, and his mystic aura only grew—not that he was aware of it. He’s the accidental Charles Manson.

The first film was a surprise award-winning hit that somehow tapped into the core of incel culture in America. I thought it was unfair that the film got that reputation – it’s not a very intelligent picture, and that works more because it doesn’t give in to market impulses. It’s subversive but in the most surface-level way possible. And yet that first film spoke to a disenfranchised suburban middle-class youth.

For the sequel, filmmaker Todd Phillips at least had the guts to keep the subversive nature of the original alive. It would’ve been easier for Joker: Folie À Deux to rest on those laurels and double down on its anti-system sentiment. Our world moved on, but Fleck’s hasn’t; that would’ve been enough. But Phillips swings for the fences – this Fleck, on the eve of a trial to decide if he should be sentenced to death for the murders he committed in the first film, meets another Arkham inmate who takes a shine on him – Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga). The two find in music a therapeutic form of escaping the grim reality around them, find the motivation to move out, and, in the process, develop a torrid and frankly convoluted romance.
If it helps Fleck/Joker, it probably doesn’t help his case, led by his defence lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), but it will liberate him from mediocrity and martyrise him.

So the film intercalates these dark, brooding moments of social and police violence with fantasy concept musical scenes to the tunes of famous musicals and other American classics (and that English cover of Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas”). Interestingly, Phillips directs the musical scenes like he directs the rest, except in a studio with more mood lighting. It’s still the same grainy, grey, 70s aesthetic but now with garish costumes. Unfortunately, Phillips doesn’t direct the musical sequences with panache, but I want to entertain an idea – he may have wanted to make these scenes like Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark, stripped of any joy with barely any background music, but found interference from a studio that didn’t want to take that many risks. I don’t know if that happened, but it can explain the tension between Phillips’ mise-en-scéne and the whole production apparatus around it. Even in the singing, Phoenix’s voice is fragile, cracking, and more humane. It’s a small mess, but one not without its charm. Even more disappointing when the non-musical scenes are so well-directed. For better or worse, Phillips has, repurposing a quote from the film, a “flair for the dramatic.”

The problem lies in what the Joker means to Phillips. In the first film, he’s a sad man whose trauma has shaped his skewed vision of the world. In the second, Phillips, thankfully, forgets that unbalanced take on mental issues so he can take Fleck for who he is. But he wants to force this notion that somehow everything he’s done is being celebrated in the outside world. In the first film, the murder of the yuppies was a suitable conduit for it, but then the monologue at the end, in front of cameras, could’ve unmasked him – Fleck is not an exciting man; he’s not even an intelligent man. Nothing he says has any depth or interest because it’s only exclusively about him.

He only becomes a voice of the disenfranchised because Phillips tells us that what we see is the opposite. Fleck lacks that personality maybe – and this is a big maybe – because Phillips and his writing partner Scott Silver – are not very good at writing that kind of dialogue. You know, the “I’m mad as hell, and I will not take it anymore” type of dialogue. They’re not Paddy Chayefsky – who is – but they don’t try to replicate that gravitas.The big climax of this film, the final statement in Joker’s trial, is supposed to be a moment of deep introspection but it doesn’t deliver it. And if anything, that’s the story of these two films.

Verdict: 2.5 out of 5
For everyone who enjoyed the first film. Because if the phenomenon of Joker (2019) eludes you, this is not going to be the one to convince you.