Ari Aster, the American writer-director of Hereditary and Midsommar, describes his sprawlingly picaresque third characteristic as a three-hour “nervousness comedy” – an archly surreal “odyssey of types” that can be an “elaborate Jewish joke” impressed by Greek performs and Kafka-esque paranoia. A rambling, labyrinthine, navel-gazing romp, it has narrative echoes of Tristram Shandy (each Sterne’s novel and Michael Winterbottom’s movie) and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic harking back to the chaotic Cinerama comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Personally, I believe Beau Is Afraid is greatest described as an amusingly patience-testing shaggy canine story that asks: “What in case your mom may hear all these unspeakable belongings you inform your therapist?” Elements of it are hilarious. Different sections sag. Some will discover it unbearable.
Joaquin Phoenix, to whom Aster was considerably drawn following his career-torching identity-crisis mockumentary I’m Still Here, is middle-aged bundle of nerves Beau. Propped up by counselling and meds, Beau lives in a grim house amid a hellishly dystopian cityscape beset by dangerous plumbing, grubby crime and violent public nudity. He has an air ticket to go to his mom on the anniversary of his father’s demise – a prospect that cranks his nervousness ranges as much as 11. However when car-crash circumstance conspires to make Beau miss his aircraft, he embarks on an extended day’s journey into fright, encountering absurd metaphorical manifestations of his depressing life.
Beau Is Afraid started life as a brief movie that Aster made in 2011, wherein the late Billy Mayo performed a person making an attempt to exit his house who leaves the keys within the entrance door, just for them to vanish – with creepy penalties. Within the feature-length model, which opens with a Tin Drum–model delivery sequence (all muffled heartbeats and muted screams), this premise offers the springboard for a parodically self-reflexive affair (decapitation as soon as once more rears its tragicomic head) that devours and regurgitates acquainted family-crisis themes from Aster’s again catalogue.
Escaping the claustrophobic confines of its supply, Aster’s most unruly and indulgent movie turns into a quixotic, tonally malleable splurge that expands right into a rhythmically irregular shapeshifting private journey. Every episode appears to exist in a distinct style, from the taut, zombie-nightmare farce of the early house scenes, via the Todd Solondz-style city illness of the second act (“only a dangerous dream”), to the play-within-a-play theatricality of an prolonged hippy woodland sojourn wherein travelling thespians attempt “to blur the road between the viewers and the gamers”.
As for the penultimate funereal farce, about which I’ve been laughing out loud for weeks, it combines the physique horror of David Cronenberg’s Shivers with the cock-and-ball sensibility of an adolescent mummy’s boy enthusiastically scrawling graffiti on a bathroom wall in school. Suppose Voltaire goes to hell through Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, unified by the one phrase that Beau’s therapist dutifully writes on his notepad: guilt.
Constructed upon the mantra that no concept is simply too outlandish (and that there’s no such factor as an affordable snort), Beau Is Afraid presents a deranged melange of Oedipal angst, terrified misogyny and self-loathing male fantasy. At its greatest it combines the exuberantly manic vitality of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love with the nightmare logic of David Lynch’s Eraserhead, whereas at its most tiresome it has tinges of Charlie Kaufman’s painfully contrived Synecdoche, New York.
The way you react will depend upon how humorous (or not) you discover a movie that’s to Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death what Woody Allen’s Love and Dying was to Tolstoy’s Struggle and Peace. At instances it might all begin to really feel like a migraine – woozy, nauseating and really lengthy. Elsewhere it has the sharp, psycho-slapstick twang of being smacked within the face with a frying pan whereas concurrently stepping on a Freudian rake, or slipping on a Buñuelian banana pores and skin. From a stabby killer who’s recognized in police studies as “a circumcised white male” to throwaway sight gags that owe a debt to Airplane! (a funeral caterer’s van bears the legend “Shiva Steve’s Grub for the Grieved”), there’s greater than sufficient absurdist insanity right here to please, infuriate and exasperate in equal measure. Bread’s Every part I Personal and Mariah Carey’s All the time Be My Child present brilliantly excruciating needle drops, whereas a joke concerning the soundtrack CD for Bette Midler’s For the Boys is so area of interest as to be virtually subatomic. Get pleasure from!
