‘The most bizarre film of the year’
At the premiere of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, the writer-director thanked the studio, A24, for being “stupid enough” to fund it. You can see where he was coming from. That’s not to say that the film is bad – in many respects, it’s brilliant – but no one will watch it without asking how he got to make such a mind-blowing, genre-bending, bladder-testing three-hour sprawl of Oedipal angst, despair and absurdist black comedy, with no conventional plot or character development. His previous arthouse horror dramas, Hereditary and Midsommar, may have been strange, but Beau Is Afraid is certain to rank as one of the most bizarre films of the year.
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Structurally, though, it’s fairly neat and contained, in that it focuses on a week in the life of one character: Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a balding, paunchy, miserable, middle-aged loner. After a prologue that shows his birth from the baby’s perspective, he is first seen telling his jovial therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) that he is returning to his childhood home to visit his mother (Patti LuPone) on the anniversary of his father’s death (a date that will gain a crucial further significance later on). The therapist doesn’t believe that the journey will be easy, because Beau is weighed down by guilt, but actually there are more practical obstacles. Beau lives in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, an urban hellscape strewn with burnt-out cars, comatose drug casualties, and rotting corpses. His own bare apartment is something of a refuge from this savage Gotham, but when he gets there after the therapy session, he is greeted by a sign on his door saying that a poisonous spider is loose in the building, and angry notes from a neighbour complaining about the volume of his music – even though he isn’t playing any music. Things get more and more nightmarish from there.
On its own, this opening 45-minute section works as a profoundly misanthropic satirical farce about the stresses of contemporary city life, with more visual gags, and more male nudity, than most raucous Hollywood comedies. A Lynchian second chapter moves from the city to the suburbs, as a wounded Beau finds himself recuperating in the comfortable home of an over-friendly surgeon (Nathan Lane), his uneasy wife (Amy Ryan), and his resentful teenage daughter (Kylie Rogers). A third chapter takes Beau to a fairy tale forest, where a kindly pregnant woman (Hayley Squires) introduces him to a wandering theatre troupe, and where one of its plays turns into a poignant, animated picture-book reverie about the life he might have had. There are tender flashbacks in which Beau’s mother is played by Zoe Lister-Jones and the young Beau is played by Armen Nahapetian. And then a final chapter, set in Beau’s family home, with mother issues that would make Norman Bates from Psycho seem well adjusted.
Not that this is the only one of his issues that gets an airing. By the end of the film, Aster has abandoned any pretence of telling a straightforward story, preferring, it seems, to write down all of his darkest, most intimate fears and fantasies about sex, illness, parenthood, money, society and death, and then present them as a kaleidoscopic collage of sitcom, cartoon, crime thriller, monster movie and science-fiction odyssey. The result seems nakedly personal while echoing the comic invention of Woody Allen’s early films, the formal precision of Stanley Kubrick, and the bleak, deadpan surrealism of Roy Andersson, with bits of Charlie Kaufman and David Cronenberg thrown in.
Viewers are sure to be impressed by Aster’s prodigious imagination and technical skill, amused by his gallows humour, and amazed by some of the outrageous images he puts on screen. But whether they will be enthralled by the film is another matter. It’s clear from the start that Beau Is Afraid is set in a heightened alternate reality where our rules don’t apply, and the impression that none of it has any internal logic or tangible consequences can leave you feeling as if somebody is recounting a weird dream they’ve had – and doing so for three long hours. Throughout those three hours, the mewling Phoenix doesn’t convey much more than the abject sadness and self-pity that drip from him in the film’s opening minutes, and the episodic structure means that while each segment is fascinating in its own right, they don’t together contribute anything essential to the narrative. If Aster had simply chopped out the second of the film’s three hours, it might have been more coherent, not less.
Beau Is Afraid
Director: Ari Aster
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan
Run-time: 2hr 59m
Release date: 21 April in the US and 19 May in the UK
So why was A24 “stupid enough” to finance such a bewildering folly? The obvious answer is that Aster made two highly profitable and acclaimed films with the studio, so he earnt the right to indulge himself. Beau Is Afraid is reminiscent of two other recent extravaganzas with comparable eccentricities and running times (and the same first letter), Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Bardo and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. They almost constitute a genre of their own. They are all stunningly virtuosic, idiosyncratic works, and they are all laudable reminders that, even now, auteurs are sometimes allowed to fulfil their wildest ambitions with no major restrictions. Still, in all three cases, a few more restrictions might have been for the best.
★★★☆☆
Beau is Afraid opens in cinemas in the US on 21 April and in the UK on 19 May.
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