Review: ‘Beau Is Afraid Is Quite An Odyssey, But Not Necessarily An Oughtasee

The first word we see written in Pretty Boy Fear is Arya Astor's powerful oedipal phantasmagoria Guilty. A story full of longing, sincere love notes, screaming corporate logos, detailed descriptions of sex shops, obscene graffiti, as well as encouraging signs (watch out, rainbows!) and cautionary tales - not the last word. brown hermit). !) But Esther, the virtue of emotional breakdown, loves to scratch the itch of her characters' tortured conscience, as fans remember from Anstral (2018), a dirty maternal ambivalence drama, and Midsummer (2019). where romantic relationships are sustained not by love but by duty. Even by these standards, the wine he developed "out of awe of beauty" is next level; It carries the weight of the thesis and the ferocity of the matter.

The accused is Bo Wasserman, a gray-haired, lonely Jew with sad eyes, a bent face and a fat belly, and he is played in his entirety by Joaquin Phoenix. Because, as the name suggests, he is afraid of many things: diseases, drugs, death, life, violent men, beautiful women, orgasms. One of the film's most indelible qualities is the way it satirizes and affirms the tragedy, implying that it is entirely paranoid rather than paranoid.

And what Bo fears most in his entire life is the exposure—even the inevitability—of his shameful thoughts, including his true feelings for his mother and his condemnation.

From the start, the Lifetime series settles for swaying, blurred images and an ever-growing barrage of female screams: me and baby Beau, kicked out of his mother's birth canal. Beo is a source of frustration and anxiety from the start, and when we see him decades later, shaken and defeated, he sets off to track down his doctor (the wily Stephen McKinley Henderson). "Have you ever wished you were dead?" asked the therapist with a smile. - None! Because he protests very violently. The film tells a very different story.

Basically, it tells four different stories, each with its own tone, atmosphere and ratio of creepy shocks to twisted laughs. These parts somehow merge into a darkly sly odyssey, a disjointed depiction of Jewish guilt, childish rebellion and maternal horror, blurring the line between horror and comedy, dream and memory, physical reality and psychological maelstrom.

You'd be forgiven for remembering it as a brutal, barely disguised beating: for three brutal but hilarious hours, Bo is harassed, robbed, humiliated, nearly drowned, shot, wounded, carted off, kidnapped, captured. shaped by drugs, murder, repeated fraud and terrorism - a chain of abuse in which only the sudden survival of the mind offers an occasional respite. (The movie could be called Beau Concussion.)

Although nothing is clear, Bo's mission remains clear: he is going to visit his long-widowed mother, Mona, even if she lives in the not-too-distant future. (Mona at different ages and in different registers of consciousness is played by the formidable Zoe Lister-Jones and the usually indomitable Patti LuPone.)

But, as we can see from the film's directorial opening sequence, furnishing his dank, sparsely furnished apartment - a Polanski-esque hideout on hellish Bosch Street - is easier said than done. Cleverly blurred sets (Fiona Crombie) and camerawork (Pawel Pogazelski) draw us into a dark, desolate purgatory where the mood is apocalyptic and light-hearted, but relentless fans and knife-wielding hunters are anything but. It is easy to define.

Is the whole world crazy or just Bo? Since the movie takes place almost entirely in his head, does it matter? When Bo's journey is interrupted by a stolen set of keys, a botched drug order and a surprise home invasion, you have to accept Bo's pain and suffering at face value - or should you? He was barely aware of his anger when Mona ("That's right," she shouted through her teeth) called him and said that he was late for some inexplicable reason.

And if you think Bo feels guilty about this, imagine how he feels the next day when he finds out that his mother smashed her face with a fallen chandelier - a sad (sort of) and sick joke, but actually the author . From the director who turned severed heads into expensive images. As if a reminder were needed, it's a profound reminder of where we are, in Astra's wretched eternal land.

If "The Heir" insists that home is a scary place, while "The Middle" finds trouble in a distant paradise, "Afraid of Beauty" might share that distinction: domestic chill and nightmarish travelogue rolled into one. . Determined to return home for his mother's funeral, Bo travels through cities and suburban deserts, wooded forests and clear deserts in an ambulance, car, ship, boat. (He also explores Moebius' film references, ranging from the mother's dilemma in Psycho to The Truman Show to the simulation of life in New York's Synecdoche.) But by the end of the film, it evens out. , the frustrated soul doesn't seem to move - or rather, it goes back to where it started.

It is no coincidence that each of the four stories presents Boone with a different idea of ​​home, or that each of his ideas turns out to be woefully inadequate. After running away from home, a badly injured Beau finds himself in a nursing home, where a close-knit couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) carefully maintain him as their dead son's bedroom. But from the comically offensive atmosphere (think Todd Salonga's Ordinary People) and Bo's house arrest bracelet on his ankle, it's clear that our bedridden hero has successfully traded one trap for another.

The third story takes Bow out of this trap in a safer, more exciting direction, and not just because he can live a few minutes without being insulted or horrified. I don't want to say more, except that this section takes the form of a major theatrical coup, placing Bo in a beautiful, vividly animated landscape (Chilean artists Cristobal León and Joaquín Cochina brought it to life in 2018 with the famous House of the wolf). And it also brings a disturbing vision of domestic family happiness that Bo refuses to imagine. It is the most beautiful moment in the film, and perhaps the most brutal for that reason. Astaire embraces the possibility of redemption, only to be ecstatic.

Are you clinging to emptiness with him? Or like me when they laugh for a second and squint to see if there's anything else? Pretty Boy Afraid offers strong evidence of Astaire's talent and limitations. This is a big, very big film that wants to free itself and its characters from the constraints of form and genre.

But this wider energy is at odds with and ultimately limited by the mother-son dialectic, a Freudian construct that seems more understated than explicit in a film that never seems scary or dark. myself

Astaire shows some stunning images, especially a scene of a moonlit ocean that suddenly quickly turns into a full bathtub, a stark reminder of how small Bo's world is. But the episode also draws us into a labyrinth of overly carefully constructed memories that serve primarily to bring to consciousness the established reality of the transcendent horrors of motherhood. We know next to nothing about young Beo (Armen Nakhapetian), a shy, mischievous child who lives an incredibly luxurious life (Mona is a successful businesswoman), but an emotional life of inevitable poverty.

Through the grimness of grief, passionate sex, flashbacks, ritualistic humiliations, unforgettable faces (Parker Posey, Richard Kind) and hauntingly repeated chants, Bo's poverty becomes clear in the film's fourth and most violent story as he experiences his homecoming. No matter how low they both go, he can always go lower.

Phoenix is ​​definitely out of place as an actor, which bodes well for the film. The suffering here is so painful and palpable, so accessible on the surface, that it makes you think that Bo as a character is more than a whispering avatar of danger. Part of the film's absurdity is that Beau's guilt is such a crippling, all-consuming force that it destroys any idea of ​​who he is, what he's done, what he's really guilty of. As a character, he is no more sentimental than the white figurine he buys his mother as a present at the beginning.

Astaire has always had a weakness for treating his characters like chess pieces, leading them to their terrible fates with surprising and sometimes tragic slowness. This approach worked brilliantly in Ancestors, turning the protagonist's dollhouse dioramas into a stunning visual uproar and hellish satanic style. In a wild, unbridled piece like Be Afraid, this is much less effective. In the end, the excess control may be too formal to achieve the frenzied catharsis Asta seeks, and the elaborate trap he set for Bo seems to finally catch up with him. I didn't go anywhere and felt guilty.

Beau Scared Trailer Description and release date of I Beau Scared Trailer