Klara e il Sole by Taika Waititi, starring Jenna Ortega, has been in theaters since October 22 and, roughly around the same date, worldwide: the film adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel can be considered a loud box-office flop, but it also holds a merciless critics’ average on Rotten Tomatoes. When the average audience score on the same platform surpassed 70%, Waititi decided to vent on Instagram, attacking the reviewers, essentially claiming how hard it is to understand him. Read what he wrote.
Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi Defends the Film and His Cinema from Criticism
On the budget of Klara e il Sole there are no clear sources, but certainly a worldwide box office of 1,800,000 dollars, for a major like Sony that involves Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams in the cast, for the direction of Taika Waititi, equals roughly zero. A resounding and very bitter flop for the director, who moreover endured a critical average around 26% on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience, however, was more generous, to the point that on the same aggregator it expressed itself with a 74%, so Taika Waititi entrusted to the social networks a very social vent: “I don’t read reviews of anything, whether it’s my own work or my colleagues’, for 15 years. But I listen to people. This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls, who couldn’t fulfill their dream of becoming artists, and who settled for turning to film criticism. The same people who also despised Jojo Rabbit. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. Trash.”
Sincerely we were struck by the aggressive register of the director’s statement, considering that at the time there certainly wasn’t the same outcry for JoJo Rabbit (81% on RT: perhaps it’s true that he doesn’t read the reviews, even if the basis of his post is precisely those). The only mitigating factor we can think of is the frustration of seeing the marketing drastically cut by a major, when it senses negative sentiment for its own film in release. That said, at the Rome Film Festival we gladly dedicated space to his press conference and to that of the leading actress Jenna Ortega, and in our review below, while noting how other discrepancies with what we feel is a more effective tone than the novel, we did not exclude that the film still had a worthy reason to exist. We will, to the end, keep hope that, within the English language’s ambiguity, that sequence “Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.” is meant in the singular and that Waititi was alluding to the “demolitions” JoJo Rabbit faced. Unfortunately the anglophone press did not interpret his sentence that way.
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