directed by Ari Aster, 2022, 179 minutes.

Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is set to travel home to visit his mother (Patti LuPone). A series of misfortunes escalate into disaster, Beau misses his flight, his apartment is destroyed, and he is left with no way to complete his journey.  

How do you feel when you step into the outside world? Are you an optimistic, cheery sort? If so, you’re unlikely to enjoy Ari Aster’s cinema, particularly not “Beau is Afraid”. Watching “Beau” will let you see the world through the eyes of the rest of us, who survey the bedlam of twenty-first century life and despair. Aster is a prodigy; his first two features, “Hereditary” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019) were marketed as horror, but left many genre fans cold, unable to see what all the fuss was about. Confrontational and cerebral, Aster subverts horror tropes, turning them to his own ends. Like David Lynch, he resists analysis. Lynch may refuse to record commentaries, but he is chatty and personable; Aster appears reticent, prickly, determined to let his work speak for itself. Abrupt transitions, discontinuities and surreal episodes give “Beau” all the characteristics of an anxiety dream but there is also ineluctable narrative logic. In this, Aster’s work feels closer to the mannered formality of Peter Greenaway or the steely precision of Kubrick. For Aster horror pervades the human condition. “Beau” completes his loose trilogy about fear, exchanging the genre trappings of his first two films for existential dread. As the title suggests, Beau’s fear is open-ended, part of life.

Aside from a mordant streak of black humour in “Midsommar” there are very few laughs in Aster’s previous films. In contrast, the first act of “Beau” is broad farce: Beau endures a mounting symphony of catastrophe, choreographed with the precision of Keaton slapstick. Aster usually puts his protagonists through hell but Beau’s attempts to escape bad luck, deadly coincidence and a toxic social environment are painfully funny. Joaquin Phoenix has a thankless task, and despite the technical aplomb of his performance many viewers found it impossible to relate to a character who simply endures whatever horrors the world throws at him and never gets angry. Beau’s passivity is designed to test our capacity for complacency and our refusal to confront the wrongs around us. Beau behaves like those who vote for ‘the smack of firm government’ in full knowledge that they are the ones most likely to get smacked.

Shot in harsh, unforgiving detail and nauseatingly vivid colour, Aster’s eye for architecture and geometric composition heightens the prevailing sense of anxiety. Jarring cuts turn day instantly into night, disorienting the viewer still further. The gaudy, distorted streetscape is exaggerated, but all too familiar to anyone still awaiting the benefits of trickle-down economics. The extreme capitalist democracies of the twenty-first century encourage their citizens to develop a virulent strain of individualism whilst simultaneously eroding any sense of community. Strident, panic-mongering media promote paranoia and fear of the other. Basic infrastructure like rubbish collection and law enforcement are failing as governments refuse to tax the rich to pay for them. In these ailing communities the social contract has fractured, and everyone must fend for themselves. Aster keeps his camera close to Beau’s point of view and is particularly adept at portraying the vulnerability of the non-driver in a world dominated by traffic. For those accustomed to viewing the street from the confines of a mobile, air-conditioned bubble the first hour of “Beau” offers a salutary change of perspective.

Aster mischievously rubs our noses in the messy consequences of passive government and rampant individualism. Critics who have labelled his film as misanthropic are missing the point: Fear of the homeless, fear of random urban violence, and fear of bugs are all symptoms of Beau’s pantophobia. Authoritarian governments exploit free-floating anxiety to disable reason and stifle compassion. One of the defining features of Aster’s cinema is the lack of sympathetic characters: The seemingly benevolent family that adopts him seems to have a sinister, hidden agenda; their damaged, self-obsessed daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers) is one of the most frightening characters in the film. Toxic families recur throughout Aster’s cinema. Here as in “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” family ties prove more of a curse than a blessing.

Like “Hamlet”, “Beau” is particularly concerned with monstrous mothers, absent fathers and damaged sons; this gives Aster an opportunity to take a swipe at Freud and the cult of psychoanalysis. In “Heredity” self-help, counselling and therapy offer little help. In “Beau is Afraid” we encounter a therapeutic commune whose masks, mummery and rude mechanicals recall “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Their exquisitely staged performance recasts Beau’s journey as heroic myth. Transmuting lived experience into stories can help us to learn and heal but stories can also foster self-deception, covering up painful truths or making a virtue of ignorance. Aster systematically tests the relationships and institutions which are supposed to offer support and finds them wanting. Like an experimental scientist he subjects his protagonists to existential assault and concludes that we must face a hostile universe alone. Beau never develops as a character and learns nothing from experience. He remains a ragdoll, blank faced and passive as he’s pummelled by misfortune. As the film develops, subtle visual clues suggest that Beau is a lab rat trapped in a maze. Numb struck by the (literally) monstrous Freudian climax we are left wondering whether the whole film has been a paranoid fantasy and that we too are trapped inside Beau’s foundering psyche. 

Even those viewers accustomed to Aster’s work will find “Beau” difficult to swallow. Picaresque and transgressive odysseys can be found elsewhere but fare like “Fellini Satyricon” (Federico Fellini, 1969) or “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (Eric Till, 1964) seem much easier to digest because they are set in the remote, literary past. There are few direct comparisons. At times it approaches Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985) but the satire is much bleaker and misses Scorsese’s forgiving view of human frailty and his warmth. In “It Couldn’t Happen Here” (Jack Bond, 1987) Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe drift through a Brexiteers pipe dream of Britain complete with ballroom dancing, stiff-upper lips, steam trains and saucy seaside postcards. Whilst, like Beau, they remain passive the trenchant social criticism of lyrics like “Shopping” and “King’s Cross” makes their contempt for Margaret Thatcher’s social revolution eminently clear. There are some similarities to another, much maligned pop film from the eighties “Pink Floyd – The Wall” (Alan Parker, 1982), particularly the climactic trial sequence and the uncomfortable twist of gynophobia woven through the imagery. That said, “Beau” also features one of the most ribald and grotesque phallophobic images ever committed to film, so at least Aster is even-handed.

In Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” (1984) Emperor Joseph II casually informs Mozart that his music has ‘too many notes’. Critics and fans may have been left reeling but “Beau is Afraid” is the work of an artist in full spate, bursting banks and shattering floodgates with a torrent of images, questions and ideas. It seems churlish to condemn such generosity from a filmmaker so full of promise. “Beau” is a film that stays with you, tugging insistently at your sleeve with some awkward, but pertinent questions about the way in which we choose to live. In leaving the question of whether his films reflect his own view of the world unanswered Aster invites his audience to make their own response. Alongside a healthy sense of the absurd “Beau” also displays intense frustration at those precepts that we are all expected to take for granted like the sanctity of family life, faith in human progress, or the notion that God or therapy can make things better. Even the most austere cinematic dystopias usually offer a flicker of hope, Aster has none to give. Beau reflects our own predicament, immobilised by our lack of agency in a world gone mad it’s all to too easy to slip into depressive illness, addiction, or self-obsession. “Beau” offers a timely wakeup call for those of us paralysed by the intellectual bankruptcy and cynical defeatism of so much political dogma.  If any hope is to be found in this brilliant, excoriating trip through the wasteland it lies in reminding us that corrupt power thrives on lethargy. If we are to avoid Beau’s fate, we must shake off dread and rediscover a healthy sense of indignation. In the words of John Lydon “Anger is an energy…”.

Quote:

“You spent your whole life going around, asking every half-wit you could find, “If I do this, can I avoid this, or will that happen?” As if you were born without the mechanism to choose. You let it all resolve itself in the absence of you! You make everyone do it for you! You think that makes you innocent?”

                                                                                                                 Matka Beau (Patti Lupone)

Connections:

Film:

‘Pink Floyd – The Wall’ directed by Alan Parker (1982)

‘After Hours’ directed by Martin Scorsese (1985)

‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ directed by Jack Bond (1987)

‘The Truman Show’ directed by Peter Weir (1998)

‘The Lighthouse’ directed by Robert Eggers (2019)

‘Poor Things’ directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (2023)

Reading:

Gaius Petronius, The Satyricon, 1^st century AD, (Hackett, ISBN 9780872205109)

Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Faber, 1996, ISBN 9780571173914