kikiclogwyni

This was one of those odd films that I really did not enjoy, but in a perverse way I was glad I saw. The reason for my review title is that it is three hours long. As an opera fan, who has sat through Wagner's Ring Cycle on several occasions, I am not someone who has a problem with long performances, but staying engaged through this was a struggle that had me checking my watch numerous times.

Beau is Afraid is basically a long living nightmare. We meet the titular character as he's preparing to go home to visit his mum, preparations that necessitate a visit to his therapist and new medications. The nightmare begins as he is leaving for the airport, late, and momentarily leaves his keys in the door of his apartment and his case in the hallway. After he's rushed around grabbing last minute items he returns to his door to find the keys and the case gone. Things spiral out of control alarmingly from there and rest of the film is about his frustrated attempts to get home. I am sure most of us have had nightmares where we are desperately trying to get somewhere and can't - well this one is three hours long and you paid to take part in it!

There are some truly memorable scenes that one can envision being good movies in their own right - the idyllic-looking suburban home that shelters a Stepfordian couple, a traumatized and traumatizing ex soldier and a truly psychotic teen being one and a rather beautiful animated sequence of Beau's alternative life being another. But instead they are just steps along this unrelentingly horrific story that never seems to want to end.

At the heart of this tale is Beau's over-bearing mother - appearing in her current day iteration towards the end and deliciously played by Patty LuPone. She has told child Beau that his father died at Beau's conception from a heart condition that Beau has inherited. She recounts this tragedy in rather too explicit detail to the young Beau, thus scoring the ultimate "no slut is good enough for my son" mother's dream of ensuring that, if he can't have sex with her (ew), he won't have sex with anyone. Just in case any of us miss the Freudian and Oedipal over (done) tones of the film, at one stage Beau goes into his mother's attic to meet his father, only to be met with an enormous Jabba The Hutt-like monster shaped like an enormous penis and balls. Which almost immediately kills someone. No one will ever accuse the writer/director Ari Aster of subtlety.

I have no doubt there will be many hailing this as a work of genius, citing a dozen or so obscure "art films" along with other cultural references in their reviews and slyly suggesting that people who didn't love it are just too simple to "get" it. But I go to the movies to be entertained, made to think, sometimes made uncomfortable, to laugh myself stupid or simply for escapism. This provided me with none of those things. All I can say is that, as the first credit came on screen (note the film continues as the credits roll) my fellow patrons got up as one, blank faced and silent, and we all stumbled gratefully into the night.

The first 10-15 minutes of this film had me wriggling in my seat and wondering if I was going to be able to sit through it. It starts with the central character, Inez, a hard-faced inmate leaving Riker's Island and re-starting her life back in New York after an unspecified prison term. Inez is clearly a tough cookie and even her first meeting her son Terry on the street had me silently screaming "run, kid, run!" It turns out that Terry had been put in foster care and, when he ends up in hospital shortly after, Inez goes to visit him and decides to kidnap him from the authorities under whose care he had been placed.

However, I found myself getting sucked in to the story, as grim and sometimes hard to watch as it was. Here we had a woman who had nothing - no money, no home and few prospects - grabbing a child because she somehow believed she could give him a better life. Her first act after snatching him was to phone around former acquaintances to beg for a free place to stay and it was truly heartbreaking to watch her desperation and the glimpse of the life she had brought this child into.

Yet she manages to get on her feet and the rest of the movie follows her, Terry and the man she marries, Lucky, as they if not thrive certainly survive. As compelling as the human characters become, there is another star of this film and that is the New York neighbourhood of Harlem. With the liberal use of overhead shots and long street scenes we see the neighbourhood go from grungy through a gradual gentrification. This is reflected more intimately in a sub plot where their new landlord tries to manipulate the family out of their low rent home, and leave them with fallen ceilings, broken pipes and a non-functioning shower.

There is a plot twist at the end that made my jaw drop which I see some people didn't like, but which I thought fleshed out the character of Inez quite well and gave depth to her motivations. All in all a gritty movie that was hard to watch in some places, a raw and honest depiction of the brutal poverty in which people sometimes live, but underscored by excellent performance by all.