directed by Ari Aster
Ari, Ari, Ari… I admire this man so much for his bravery to make films that are so unusual that there’s a huge risk of not reaching to many viewers. However, his work is loved not only by me, but millions of other cinephiles, and perhaps that’s why I had such big expectations before watching today’s film. As you see, I’m still recommending it, so I did like it in the end, but it’s definitely not my favourite production by Ari Aster. In this story we get to know Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged man living alone in a really dangerous city. He struggles with a serious anxiety and has to be taking meds in order to function. Beau is preparing for visiting his mother, who is a wealthy and successful person, but because of certain reasons he misses the flight and has to come up with some other way to reach her. Things get complicated and the man doesn’t know how to solve his newly occurring problems, yet he really needs to visit his mother as he’s afraid to disappoint her. And that’s all you can learn from me about the plot, because what happens next is too strange to even describe it. The film is 3 hours long and I think that after 2,5h I was still not convinced about the point of making this production. Why did he do it? It’s so messy, it’s way too much in every single aspect, it’s horribly inconsistent in its form… but then the ending happened and everything became clear to me. I’m not going to spoil much, but I do want to share my interpretation of this film, so if you haven’t seen it, here’s a warning. So… I’m not sure what other people see in this story, but to me it’s an incredibly important issue that Ari has addressed. I believe that Beau is an example of a grown-up man who has been highly traumatised by his mother. You may say – nothing new, we have many stories like that. Indeed, but here we kind of indirectly focus on the character of the mother – she represents women who decide to have children without a pinch of awareness what raising a human being really means. His mother has been accusing Beau for everything from the very beginning and the boy grew up constantly feeling like a failure. If you watch closely, he keeps apologising for things he’s not even responsible for. Here’s a small spoiler – remember the messages he was getting in his flat about being noisy even though he wasn’t noisy at all? Maybe I’m wrong, but to me it was supposed to show us that the world keeps searching for someone to blame and we have to have a thick skin not to let them destroy us. Beau was raised as his mother’s personal toy to blame, so he didn’t have a chance to adapt to the real world. His parent didn’t support him in strengthening his self-esteem and finding his personal value, so he ended up feeling constantly anxious and worthless. The ending hit me the most because it showed how little we care about helping traumatised people. It wasn’t Beau’s fault to be born in such family, so from the very beginning he was left alone to learn and deal with everything our reality has to offer. And what do we do as society? We ignore. We judge. We reject. The idea for this production was marvellous and I’m thankful that it was made. However, in my opinion Ari couldn’t decide about the form and went for them all. “Hey, Ari, which form is your film going to be in?” – “Yes.” At some points it was even tacky, so that is why I cannot rate it higher. But for the sake of the messages coming out of this production – I definitely recommend you to see it.
My rating: 6/10
S.
I have nothing to watch 