Beauty

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.

Without imposing too much of a Marxist interpretation on this film it would be good to ponder on how much our actions are partly formed by the society in which we live. I was shocked to read one reviewer say Francois, the lead character is old, fat and ugly. Is this the sort of judgement we impose upon others created by the endless images of ' beautiful people ' around us ? Francois lives in a world that is repressed, ugly in its moral hypocrisy and full of racism and homophobia. He is trapped in this world, like most of us if we are honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we are trapped in the society we are born in. Some fight to get out, others stay. Many societies are ugly towards homosexuality and he lives in one of them, miserable in a loveless marriage and secretly yearning for the beauty of a fulfilled life he can no longer achieve. The last scene in the film was achingly accurate about this. After many years I have at last caught up with this film. Like other reviewers I saw how terrible the rape is, but I tried to understand the long fierce years of frustration and society's impositions that made it happen. Fritz Lang in ' Scarlet Street ' showed a similar unpunished crime. and Francois will have many long years ahead to live with this guilt. The monster in this film is the societies that breed the climate for such an action - the homosexual persecution and torture in Russia is just one example, and even within America and the UK everything is not ' beautiful ' and discrimination still exists. How many clothes shops for example where two beautiful people advertise the clothes are two men, or two women, clearly in love and together ? I have seen none. Beauty is for the so-called normal. To conclude I thought the film was expertly made and the time it took to relate the story was I believe for us to look closely at the world that surrounded this inwardly desperate man who has a lot of love within, but explodes and commits an atrocious act because he does not have any possibility in his society to express it. The horrifying sexual orgy of homosexual hating men at the beginning of the film was as equally painful to watch, caught like flies in the web of the world that society has made for them. One of the most thought provoking films I have seen recently, equal to the best of the great director Fritz Lang.

For no apparent reason it has taken me 3 years to get around to watching this film. I wish I had waited 3 years more. After reading about all the acclaim this film received as an "art film" I cannot help but wonder if I had just finished watching the same movie.

More so, I am amazed that none of the critics that reviewed this film could just have said that in fact it was a really badly written movie to which a single person might be able to memorize all the lines of the entire script.

There is nothing memorable about this film except for the consistent bleakness from start to the literally downward spiraling end.

You don't need to be an intellectual to understand obsession, or the need to dominate and hurt without cause. We have all crossed paths with angry and regretful people. Yet as a viewer it is hard to understand why no effort was made to project this struggle with more credit to the intelligence of the viewer.

I hate that this film falls in the gay and lesbian genre. It is more about violence and bigotry than homosexuality.

I can't help feeling like this film was written somewhere between the opening of a cheap bottle of whiskey, someone's last fifty rand and passing out on the floor.

Oliver Hermanus's 'Beauty' is a harsh film, the story of a repressed gay man in a loveless (straight) marriage prone to intermittent bouts of sexual violence. The way it is filmed is designed to echo the sense of loneliness in his life: lots of long, still shots that emphasise just how little is really going on, except for his brooding obsessions. In fact, I can't remember the last time I watched a film in which background noise is so prominent: I can see why it was shot in this way, but the on-going hum does get annoying after a while. There's only so long one wants to watch, and listen to, nothing much happening in a sawmill or cafeteria. In the end, the reductionist animal-ism of the protagonist makes it impossible to sympathise with him; indeed, his relentless calculation makes him seem chilling rather than tragic, and in consequence the film feels unpleasant rather than sad.

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.