Daily Archives: Wednesday, December 2, 2015

  • Beauty

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Skoonheid

    Oliver Hermanus (2011)

    As François van Heerden, the Bloemfontein businessman who is the main character in Beauty, Deon Lotz is the embodiment of my idea of a middle-aged Afrikaner – big, burly, unsmiling.  (Vestigial anti-white South African prejudice makes me suppose it was the end of apartheid that wiped the smile off his face.)  François is a man’s man in more ways than one:  he’s homosexual.  The first scene of the movie, which Oliver Hermanus wrote as well as directed, takes place at François’s daughter’s wedding but the bride’s father’s gaze is fixed not on his daughter but on her friend Christian – conspicuously so.   The sequence is a bad case of A Single Man syndrome – unless François is invisible to his guests how can they not notice?  I know I always make this point but, when a drama depends on the discrepancy between what’s going on inside a character’s head and his appearance to the world outside his head, it’s critical for the actor and director to convey this distinction – to make the audience aware of what the other people on screen don’t see.  Because it’s so immediately obvious that François has his eye on Christian, I was immediately doubtful about Beauty.  I’d completely lost confidence in Oliver Hermanus before the film was much older.

    That opening announces too soon and obviously what’s on François’s mind but, in case we were in any doubt about his sexual feelings, Hermanus also soon shows us that he doesn’t touch his wife in bed.  We can see from her shrivelled, melancholic mien that she knows how things are – even if she doesn’t know how her husband gets what he needs sexually.  He drives into the country and arrives at a farm where he and a group of other men drink beer together and swap gay porn videos.  These play in the background as the men have sex with each other.  (It’s typical of Beauty that they have sex and watch porn at the same time.)  Like François, the other men in this group are married and/or apparently straight:  the house rules include ‘no faggots, no coloureds’.  Since François indulges in homosexual sex purely in order to satisfy his physical urges, it seems surprising that he falls madly in love with Christian.  We’re meant to think that the latter’s devastating ‘beauty’ explodes the well-established routines of François’s secret sexuality but I never could believe this.  Charlie Keegan, who plays Christian, has pretty boy good looks.  Christian is training to be a lawyer but he’s also a male model in television commercials.  At the wedding we see him working his good looks – his manner is flirty and borderline camp, and Hermanus never addresses the question of how this conflicts with the macho imperatives of François’s sexual lifestyle.  (Although he’s the son of one of François’s oldest friends, Christian arrives as a bolt from the blue.  I didn’t understand why it seems François hadn’t seen him since he was a child – especially in view of Christian’s minor celebrity.)   The motor of the story, and what’s supposed to be moving about it, is that François finds himself attracted to another man in what, for him, is an unprecedented way.  Yet, when he brutally rapes Christian, you don’t feel this is François’s only option after serious attempts at intimacy of a physically less explicit kind have failed.  François reverts to his usual practice of aggressive, loveless sex pretty quickly.

    Oliver Hermanus puts into one character different tropes from stories about repressed or concealed homosexual natures and doesn’t work them into a persuasive combination.  The only interesting idea in the movie is the linking of unacceptable sexual preferences with racial views that were conventional under the apartheid regime but which have become relatively marginalised in twenty-first century South Africa.  Hermanus doesn’t follow this through either, though.  The film’s bleak final shot – as François drives his car into a spiralling underpass – is expressive of his situation at the start of Beauty but takes no account of what he’s done to Christian.  It’s not clear either how François can be sure Christian isn’t going to tell others what happened – especially since one of Hermanus’s main points seems to be that Christian is part of an utterly different generation, and easy in his sexual ambiguity in a way that’s impossible for a man like François.  By the end of the film, it seems right that it opened with Deon Lotz’s eyes; although they’re a giveaway in that moment, they are the heart of Beauty.  You can’t take your eyes off Lotz either.  There in what seems like nearly every frame, he gives a highly committed performance, even if the pressure that it generates seems to derive from François’s unhappy circumstances as much as from the actor’s force.

    25 April 2012

  • Beasts of the Southern Wild

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Benh Zeitlin (2012)

    There was a fair-sized audience for the show I saw and if Beasts of the Southern Wild is a box-office hit it will deserve its success – it’s a good film, although liable to be an overrated one, at least by critics.  What’s undoubtedly extraordinary about this first feature by Benh Zeitlin is that it’s an American film about Americans living in extreme material hardship.   Although the island in the movie, the ‘Isle de Charles Doucet’, is fictional, it’s inspired, according to Wikipedia, ’by several isolated and independent fishing communities threatened by erosion, hurricanes and rising sea levels in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, most notably the rapidly eroding Isle de Jean Charles’.   When I say the film is liable to be overrated by critics, I mean that, because the ‘Bathtub’ community of Beasts of the Southern Wild is based on real people in poverty, some will be wary of applying usual critical criteria to the movie.  In order to make the piece emotionally effective (which it certainly is), Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote the film with him, have to focus on particular individuals within the community and the heroine, the young girl Hushpuppy, is uniquely independent-minded and courageous.  (The script is based on Alibar’s one-act stage play Juicy and Delicious but the material is evidently much changed:  the protagonist of Alibar’s play is a boy and the story is set in Georgia.)   In school, the Bathtub children learn about aurochs (prehistoric ancestors of cattle) and the film is named for these huge creatures, which are a recurring presence in the world on screen.  When Hushpuppy and some of the other girls (boys aren’t much in evidence at all) are returning from an expedition to a floating bar called the Elysian Fields, the aurochs encroach menacingly at their backs.  The other kids scream and flee but Hushpuppy stands her ground.  The beasts kneel and then withdraw.  Hushpuppy’s difference from the other children makes her a compelling focus for the film; it also makes it difficult, though, to see her capacity to survive and her passion for life as representative of the Bathtub community.

    The aurochs are frightening but admirable as they lumber across the landscape:  the way the beasts keep going turns them into an image of, as well as an apparent threat to, the resilient humans.  The aurochs are a triumph but, in other respects, Beasts of the Southern Wild is by no means free of cliché.  Aside from the relationship of Hushpuppy and her dying father, Wink, there aren’t many tensions within the Bathtub community, as if deprivation had got rid of that kind of thing.  A waitress on the Elysian Fields may be Hushpuppy’s mother and is certainly a golden-hearted whore.  Some of the plotting is primitive.  When Wink leads an escape from the shelter to which the Bathtub people have been evacuated, the authorities who sent them there are remarkably absent during a highly conspicuous great escape.   In her closing voiceover, Hushpuppy explains that ‘I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right’, a line which makes you think there must be more access to TV and movies on the Isle de Charles Doucet than you’d previously assumed.

    I can’t complain, however, if Beast of the Southern Wild gradually develops into a drama more conventional than it looks like being during its first half.  I preferred the human story to the fantastic, apocalyptic weather and geography – storms, hurricanes, the melting icecaps which release the aurochs back into nature.    The film has a fine score (by Dan Romer and Zeitlin) and images of beauty and brutality (photographed by Ben Richardson) – and Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy is amazing.  She’s just turned nine now but was only five when she auditioned for the part.  Although she’s very natural, Benh Zeitlin gets a real performance from Wallis:  this isn’t simple observation of a non-professional.  It’s an obvious thing to say but she does suggest a person old beyond her years (even if Hushpuppy’s well-formed philosophy of life is hard to explain).  She’s brilliant at being open and, when something’s too painful, at shutting off through a light going down in her eyes.  Dwight Henry as the handsome, volatile Wink is over-dynamic at first but the two build a strong connection and Henry, who had also never acted professionally before, is increasingly expressive as he quietens down.   At the end of Wink’s life, the memory of his kinetic qualities earlier on is touching.

    25 October 2012

     

     

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