Director: Ari Aster (USA, UK, Finland, Canada). Year of Release: 2023
So there’s this guy who’s worried that everyone in his neighbourhood is a drug dealer or a prostitute or a murderer, and to be honest that naked guy who sits on the street toying with a knife does look a bit dangerous, so he barricades himself into his flat using as many bolts as he can, and he tries to get some sleep because he’s due to fly to visit his mother the next day for the anniversary of the day when his dad died conceiving him, but he can’t sleep, and a neighbour keeps pushing written messages under the door asking him to turn the music down, although he’s not making any noise at all, and then the neighbour retaliates by playing his own music full blast, which means that the guy misses his alarm, and has to go immediately to the airport, so he packs a bag and leaves it outside and his keys in the door, but he’s forgotten his present for mum, so he goes back inside, but when he returns both the bag and keys have been stolen, so he take some new Zypnotycril tablets which his genial psychiatrist has just diagnosed for his anxiety, but when he swallows the pills the taps in the building aren’t working, and when he googles what happens when he takes Zypnotycril without water he reads that it could be fatal, so he wedges open his flat door and the front door while he rushes past the assumed drug dealers, and prostitutes and murderers to the shop opposite to buy a bottle of water, but the machine in the shop doesn’t take his card, and as he delves his pockets for change, he sees all the drug dealers and prostitutes and murderers entering his house and shutting the door behind them, so all he can so is climb the scaffolding outside to watch them partying in his flat and trashing the place, and when he finally gets in and rings his mother to tell her he’s missed his flight he reaches a UPS delivery guy on the other end of the phone who says that there’s a woman without a head in his mother’s flat, and the missing head has been replaced by the chandelier which fell on her, so he has a bath to relax, but when he stares up at the bathroom ceiling there’s a man with a knife who falls on him and starts attacking him, so he runs naked into the street, trying to avoid all the drug dealers and prostitutes and murderers, but then a cop tells him not to move and threatens to taser him, so he runs off only to be run over by a car, and when he does wake up after 2 days he finds out that the naked knifeman has indeed stabbed him several times.
Beau is Afraid has barely got started, and already it’s breathlessly chock full of Stuff. There is much more of this to come.
The film regularly changes genres and characters. The only person who is there throughout is the titular Beau who tries to make his way to his mother’s funeral (a stuffy official on the other end of the phone tells him that it is her express wish not to be interred until he has arrived). If you want to get all High Art about this, Beau is Afraid is about one man’s Odyssey through a world of misfortune to try and achieve catharsis. Fortunately, it achieves this aim by being very silly.
Beau is taken in by Grace, the woman who ran him over. Grace tends his wounds but seems reluctant to let him carry on to his mother’s funeral. Her husband Roger, a doctor, applies an electronic “health monitor” which looks like an ankle tag, and their porch is patrolled by Jeeves, a former army colleague of their son who died in Nam. Jeeves, who we regularly see scene stealing in the background, went slightly crazy and started shooting at his own troops.
Finally escaping from Grace and Roger, Beau is rescued in the woods, where an acting troupe is staging what seems to be a play of his life. This is the least interesting (let’s not mince words, the most boring) part of the film. While none of the film is plausible, what happens elsewhere has its own internal logic, and we feel Beau’s suffering. Turning it into a staged fantasy removes any dramatic tension, and you don’t have any sense that what you are seeing is real on any level.
The film continues to change time and place, from Beau’s memories of the girl on holiday who made him promise to wait for her, to a final trial and denunciation in a clapped out sinking motor boat surrounded by terraces of critics. We learn more about Beau’s domineering mother and receive evidence that not everything that we have been told so far is, strictly speaking, true. This would be important in a film where the storyline was really important. Here it is largely incidental.
You may reasonably ask “but what’s it all about?”, especially when we see the adverts for Beau’s mother’s company covered in photos of him at different ages. There is a decent case to be made that Beau is living in a Truman Show, set up by his mother so that she can continue to manipulate his life. You could ask this question, but I’m not sure that this is really the right one to ask. I preferred the parts of the film when it’s not really clear what is going on or why.
If we try to explain exactly what is happening or to impose some clarity, we do it at the expense of destroying what makes the film intriguing. It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t have to make sense. Much of the film’s humour lies in its incongruity and in the sight gags that we see (or often miss) in the background. Understanding what is happening is not the point, not the main point, anyway. Director Ari Aster is fucking with our heads, and generally doing this very well.
Before going into the cinema this afternoon, I was asked what I think of Joachin Phoenix’s acting. I answered that I don’t have a strong opinion either way of the actual acting, but he does have a knack for choosing interesting parts. In recent years, he’s acted in films by Paul Thomas Anderson, Lynne Ramsay, and Jacques Audiard (among several other leading independent directors), and while these roles were not universally great, they all followed an intriguing narrative.
Once more Phoenix has a leading role which isn’t really that of a typical handsome leading man. Beau is balding and does not dominate but shows vulnerability – fear, even (the clue’s in the film’s title). He is a Job-like figure to whom bad things happen, starting with his difficult childhood with a manipulative plutocratic mother who stuck him in the attic. The film revels in asking us just how much suffering Beau can take, and Phoenix takes on this role stoically.
In saying that you should see Beau is Afraid, I’m not saying that you’ll like it, nor necessarily that you should like it. Eileen Jones, my favourite film critic, absolutely hated it. The film is too long (3 hours? Really?) self-indulgent, and contains many scenes that are really only there because following the success of the excellent Midsommar, no-one had the confidence to tell director Aster to tone it down. Nonetheless, you’re unlike to see another film like this this year.
Second viewing (October 2023)
Having watched Beau is Afraid again at the week-end, and re-reading the review above, it struck me exactly how much you can say about the film. This doesn’t make it a great film as such, but at the very least it’s thought-provoking. I loved it once more, but you can see where it might be divisive. If you’re not prepared to go along with it, this could be a very long 3 hours.
Let’s start with something I touched on last time, and that’s the acting of Joachim Phoenix, or rather the character of Beau. Beau is not just afraid – he’s neurotic, he’s riddled with self-doubt. He is not someone who acts upon the world, but is acted on. I guess this is the nub of Eileen Jones’s criticism – that she wants characters that actually do something. Any doing things in this film is confined to the minor characters.
And yet, if you’re prepared to indulge the film, Phoenix embodies a sense that there is a hostile world out there, and he’s not sure how to deal with it. We are encouraged to identity with someone who has no idea what is going on, and all he knows is that it’s not going to end well for him. From the scary neighbours to the passers-by who take him in, Beau lives in a world which he cannot trust. This appeals to our insecurities.
It also makes the scene towards the end, where he reunites with his first love all the more poignant. She initiates sex, and although Beau knows (or at least he thinks he knows) that this will lead to him dying of a hereditary disease, he is overjoyed. After initially protesting that this can’t happen, he goes along with it. This is peak Beau, although there is also part of him which believes that finally contacting with someone emotionally is worth dying for.
And although the film made me think a lot, there’s not much I can say about which articulates the sense of alienation and dread which you get by just watching the damn film. Just trying to appraise it like dancing about architecture. The a film speaks a different language to that used by film critics. As said, this is not necessarily a good thing, but whether or not you enjoy the film depends more on your emotional than your intellectual response.
It worked for me. Again. And with a better sense of how much was left, this time round I didn’t have the same sense that it was too long, although the scene in the forest is still the weakest part. Sure, it contains some revelations which help further the plot, though seeing as the plot is one of the film’s least important parts, that’s not so important. Maybe it would have been better to jump straight from Beau’s induction to his mother’s funeral.
Other views are possible, and – with this film at least – almost certainly inevitable. I’m still not sure how much I’d recommend it to everyone, but if this is your sort of film, it is very good at what it does.
CinePhil 