Karl and Marilyn (2003)

Fat Chicks and Imbeciles: the films of Priit Pärn

Pärn’s most recent film, Karl and Marilyn, is a story about a man and a woman. Karl wants to flee from the pressures of fame. Marilyn, a rural girl, is tired of her boring country life and wants fame. Karl (Marx?) has his beard shaved off, murders the barber, and goes underground. Marilyn (Monroe) kills her grandmother, and goes to the city in search of fame. She achieves it when a gust of wind from the sewer lifts her skirt up. The masses are enthralled. After a while, though, they tire of her skirt antics. During a performance, Karl inadvertently rises out of the sewer. The people are relieved that Karl has returned. Is this a cautionary tale about the return of communism? Are young Estonians rejecting their roots (in one scene, Marilyn is shown knitting with her grandmother in an distinctly Estonian style) for the glitter and glam of capitalism? What happens when they realize just how empty it all is? Will communism (as we’re beginning to see hints of in Russia) return to power?
For the record, Pärn thinks this interpretation is ridiculous. “It’s a story about a man and woman and how men are always pressured to be someone, while women are simply supposed to ‘be’.
Karl and Marilyn is strikingly designed and features some funny moments, but overall the film feels rushed and unsatisfactory.
Robinson, C. (2005). Fat Chicks and Imbeciles: the films of Priit Pärn. Metro Cinema Publications Number Two, March, lk 7.

If you combined a classic twisted film noir narrative with a meditation on the troubling implications of the current cult of celebrity and glossed everything with a touch of the dry dark humour of an Aki Kaurismäki movie you might end up with something like Karl and Marilyn. /---/
Karl and Marilyn is full of references to other films. A strange, shapeless detective character in massively oversized fedora and trench coat addresses the audience in a world-weary voice over, recalling classic “private eye” films from the 1940s and 50s, Karl, an action movie star, resembles Johnny Weissmuller and appears to have gained a degree of notoriety from starring in a series of Tarzan films, Marilyn duplicates Marilyn Monroe’s iconic skirt-raising scene from The Seven-Year Itch, and a nerdy photographer discovers Karl’s crime after he has accidentally photographed and enlarged it, as in Antonioni’s Blow-Up.
Perhaps the most humorous moments of the film come when Pärn quotes or satirizes other cartoons and animators. Marilyn not only channels Marilyn Monroe but also Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop, the archetypal cartoon sex symbol; she even utters Betty’s immortal tease of a catchphrase, “Boop-boop-be-doop!” before her skirt flies up over her head, perhaps in itself an homage to Betty’s constant and relatively unsuccessful attempts to adjust her own costume. /---/
In the middle of the film, in a scene in which two detectives stake out a movie theatre, Pärn provides his own take on Walt Disney’s classic Snow White complete with the requisite cutesy goggle-eyed dwarves and forest animals, but also, in keeping with the distinctive sensibility of his own work, with a certain grotesquerie that undermines and ridicules the traditional Disney style. The princess that Pärn’s dwarves find is past her “best-before” date, with the implication being that Disney’s own princess is outmoded.
Celia Nicholls
Nicholls, C. (2005). Karl and Marilyn. Karl ja Marilyn. Metro Cinema Publications Number Two, March, lk 22.