Beauty

Oliver Hermanus wonderfully crafted "Beauty" was South Africa's submission to the Academy Awards as well as 2011 Un Certain Regard Cannes Film Festival Nominee and a Cannes award winner. This is a tale of repressed turmoil that slowly creep ups to the viewer. A very capable Deon Lotz plays François in an excellent performance filled with subtle anger, rage, jealousy and obsession. These feeling progressively take their toll on the unsuspecting Christian, brilliantly portrayed by Charlie Keegan with a devastating innocence and magnetic charm that will keep audiences disturbed long after experiencing this film.

Family man Francois van Heerden is a haven of many secrets. Secrets that deteriorate as well as rot the insides. In his endurance of life's test and family matters, François is able to keep an expected straight face in his daily dealings as he slowly asphyxiates for attention from his daughter's mate Christian. Christian, on the other hand, not only regards Francois as an elderly figure worthy of respect due to friendship ties with his father but refers to him as "uncle", an adoptive role soon to be tested by an ever raging need to relate in highly improbable ways unbeknown to an oblivious Christian . However, we get the sense that Christian honestly looked up to Francois as an additional father figure source.

The platonic dealings slowly eats away at Francois as he repeatedly insists Christian refer to him by his name in order to detract from the connecting familiar upbringing which seems to awkwardly remind Francois to hold back on his planned intentions. Effective scheming leads to the an extremely troubling conclusion based on a number of deliberate choices and sequential actions meant to pander to the vile objectives to be executed.

Upon the enforcement of his plans, François realizes the results are now irreversible. The damage is done and permanent. The post mutilating events leads to reparations that will ultimately render Francois unrepentant and numb to an uneven arrangement. The brilliance of this story falls within the mix bag of emotions this film emits. The film is beautifully haunting as it unfolds, yet extremely ugly. "Beauty" is a cinematic gem worthy of attention because it will illicit a variety of strong and deep long lasting reactions. It will encourage dialogue with other viewers immediately after watching regarding its many unanswered questions of what could have been.

Beauty is a generally well-made movie about the ugly consequences of sexual repression in an intensely, violently homophobic society in South Africa (although it could just as well have been set in the United States or most other countries). The movie's few serious flaws--Deon Lotz is not believable as a gay man, even as a severely closeted and homophobic gay man; and Charlie Keegan is nowhere near the beauty the movie makes him out to be--in a way aren't really flaws at all, because those incongruities reinforce the fundamental impossibility of anything approaching health and sanity in such a perverted society. The true perverts are the homophobes, and this movie exposes them and portrays the hypocrisy, depravity and violence of their lives with great power and clarity.

The characters are bilingual; the movie's dialog is about 30% English and 70% Afrikaans, often switching back and forth several times within a single multi-person conversation. That would be okay if either both languages were subtitled (the best solution) or if the English were not spoken with a pronounced South African accent--but instead they chose to subtitle ONLY the words spoken in Afrikaans.

Often I found myself wondering why the subtitles suddenly stopped in the middle of a conversation only to realize too late that they were speaking English now so I was supposed to know what they were saying; then they would switch without warning back to Afrikaans and the subtitles resumed.

That's a big mistake, it would have been easy to avoid, and it's unacceptably and unnecessarily distracting. When the same voice alternates between Afrikaans and Afrikaans-accented English, a non-bilingual listener can't make the instantaneous adjustments required to understand every word. It would have cost them practically nothing to subtitle the English too, but they didn't. It became slightly less a problem later in the movie just because I got used to it, but it never ceased to be a distraction. That's the main reason I deducted a few stars.

There seems to be a misapprehension about this movie and is key to understanding it. Francois is not in fact a blood uncle. In the opening wedding scene Christian says something ( I can't remember his actual words) which establish that. The opening scene shows Francois transfixed by a vision of a young man known to him last as a boy before the two families lost touch. If he were a REAL uncle, how likely is it that he doesn't already know what he looks like? This changes the whole dynamic of the movie and makes his actions at the later beach scene easier to understand. This movie is very good, but not an easy watch, but I feel that viewers need to know the above, (a point which even a few commercial reviewers got wrong) in order to appreciate its merits.

It's a slow burner but all the more satisfying for that. I like to get to the crux of a movie and here it is all about self denial. A closet homosexual who lives his life in complete denial of his sexual self. The scene where the men get together to indulge in an orgy but specify that no homosexuals are allowed makes the point without any preamble. The tension surrounds the main character's desire for a straight young man, you can feel his lust build and build and you know that is going to lead him to do something terrible and it does. The aftermath is very realistic, almost anti climatic but so many rape cases are not reported (especially male rape) that I felt it was wholly believable. I am not LGB or T but you don't have to be to get the message being portrayed here: suppression of your true self is a dangerous thing. One thing I discovered while looking into this movie was that there is a Queer Palm at Cannes, if it encourages more films like this it can only be a good thing.

My goodness, one hour and forty minutes of watching paint dry. The amount of material in this film could have been disposed of in an hour or less.

It's just boring, boring, boring. And then we get to the "incident" referred to in the plot outline. Well, that such a severe and serious incident seemed to have no consequences at all was simply not on the cards.

I was fortunate in having a version that subtitled the English parts as well as the Afrikaans. If I'd had just the Afrikaans parts subtitled, as some have mentioned happened when they watched, I would have given up.

No one in this film was remotely sympathetic, not the main character and his dysfunctional family, not his friends or secret friends, not the "Beauty" of the title who wanted to take advantage without paying the price.

It's difficult to give details without turning this into spoilers, but the later events of the film could not conceivably have been engendered by repression and being closeted. It doesn't work on the psychological, social or cinematic level. And as for the ending, were we meant to be sympathetic? I wasn't.

Honestly, don't bother.