Ari Aster really wanted to come to Montreal to present his new film in person, Beau Is Afraid (handsome is scared). And for good reason: it is here that the American filmmaker shot it. Cantor of anguish and strangeness to whom we owe the memorable Hereditary (Hereditary) And Midsommar (Midsommar, summer solstice), Ari Aster offers, with Beau Is Afraid, another of those unusual nightmares of which he has the secret. With the notable difference that the proposal this time is much more radical.
Joaquin Phoenix, invested at will, plays Beau, a neurotic fifty-something who tries to go to his mother. The reason for the trip? To celebrate the anniversary of the death of his father, who passed away after his conception. There follows an odyssey whose oedipal dimension, between two skilfully calibrated malaises, is sometimes hilariously literal.
“The universe that Beau inhabits is what came to me first. Like some kind of haunted fairground house, evil and full of distorting mirrors, you know? explains Ari Aster, interviewed in a chic hotel in the metropolis.
“It was meant to be a distorted version, although perhaps not so much, of the world we live in. Beau’s world is awful the same way our world is awful, but kicked it up a notch. Or maybe several notches, ”concedes the filmmaker, smirking.
This allegorical track is certainly fascinating, but it is, after all, only one of the many readings that it is possible to make of the film. For example, we can see in Beau a man suffering from schizophrenia, or who is immersed in a psychosis. However, knowing that the film marries its only perspective, the delirious action is easily explained since following this logic, one is in the head of Beau.
We can, that said, just as well approach the film from the surrealist angle: if Luis Buñuel had adapted The fanciful tenant by Roland Topor (brought to the screen by Roman Polanski in 1976), it would have given something approaching.
When we share these two visions with Ari Aster, the filmmaker smiles, hesitates, is about to say something, then changes his mind. We specify, the very pleasant interview has this particularity that Ari Aster clearly wants to talk about his film, while obviously fearing to say too much.
“I don’t want to guide the public… but I like these two ways of perceiving the film you are talking about: they seem to me to be consistent with what I tried to accomplish. »
A life not lived
We cannot blame the filmmaker for remaining evasive: faced with this hallucinatory journey punctuated by crazy unexpected events and improbable encounters, we are flabbergasted by his unbridled imagination. The filmmaker multiplies the finds, sometimes absurdly wacky, sometimes insidiously macabre. The burst of laughter is followed by a shudder of dread, then the gnashing of teeth.
It’s a film where reality, if it exists, gets out of hand: we meet a murderous exhibitionist, bereaved parents with suspicious benevolence, a mute veteran, a sociopathic teenager and, in a distinctly Freudian attic, a creature whose nature we will keep silent. Among others.
“The story first came to me in bursts of inspiration, ideas, bits of universe and snippets of crises that Beau might go through… Then I wrote a version like a stream of consciousness, very episodic and unstructured… Then I revisited it, and I started cutting stuff, adding stuff, building structure, until I figured out what it was; what the movie was about. »
When we seize the ball by asking him “what the film is about”, we expect Ari Aster to evade the question, but no:
“The film is about an unlived life,” he replies this time without hesitation.
A feverish trance
Knowing this, it is not surprising that Beau finds himself at some point before a Kafkaesque court of justice having to justify his existence during a sequence combining A Matter of Life and Death (Or stairway to Heaven), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and above all Defending Your Life (It’s my death after all), by Albert Brooks (on which Ari Aster wrote an exciting essay for Criterion).
Both films, for the record, revolve around a character who, during a trial in the afterlife, must justify his existence.
At the mention of Brooks’ film, Ari Aster’s eyes light up: “It’s one of my favorite films, and THE My mom’s favorite movie. She was the one who introduced me to it. The most curious thing is that at the start, in Beau Is Afraid, the trial sequence was meant to be more of a dark take on Powell and Pressburger’s film. It wasn’t until I was shooting it that I got the full measure of the influence of Brooks’ film: the whole aspect of the excerpts from Beau’s life that are shown on a giant screen, in order to condemn him, c is completely Defending Your Life… »
Defending Your Life is also explicitly centered around the theme of fear as a brake on fulfillment. “Oh, yes! I realize this parallel when you mention it. Fear is indeed what plagues Beau in his “unlived life.”
“You know, this whole sequence, I wrote it like in a feverish trance. »
A “feverish trance”, that sums up perfectly Beau Is Afraid.
“It’s a strange and demanding film, and I’m grateful that A24 gave me the resources to make it. It’s an alienating movie, and one that’s unforgiving in the way it’s unpleasant to some people. »
For what it’s worth, the author of these lines is not one of those people, on the contrary.
The film “Beau Is Afraid” hits theaters April 21