![]() ![]() One of the most apparent themes in Beau Is Afraid is guilt. Because then I would be trying to bend the world to what I was feeling when it should be the other way around.” Those things affect me so much that to make any decision to try to feel certain about who the character is would be a mistake. It’s how talk to each other, the set, the other actors, the wardrobe, the look, the hair-all of that has to come together. “Everything has to be a reaction to the environment,” he says. Given the ambiguous nature of the movie, viewers are still seemingly left to decide if Mona’s death and the woes that plagued Beau in its wake were all orchestrated by Mona as a punishment for her disloyal son, or if everything was in Beau’s head all along.įor Phoenix’s part, he says he approached playing Beau from a place of uncertainty about the truth of the character. “Their relationship is complicated because Mona gives so much love-the uncontrollable kind that can move mountains but also create anger and resentment between giver and receiver,” Armen Nahapetian, who plays a 12-year-old version of Beau in a flashback sequence, said in the production notes. That’s like the most Jewish thing.'” The end all be all of mommy issuesīy the end of the film, Beau discovers that Mona is not really dead and instead elaborately faked her own death simply to see if he would react in a way that she deemed appropriate. “They’re always punishing people for not honoring them in the right way. “Greek tragedies always really made me laugh because the gods in those plays are so petty and so ridiculous,” Aster says. The Greeks come into play as well, with odes to Oedipus Rex, Medea, and, of course, The Odyssey, assuming a significant role in Beau’s hero’s journey. “He captures intense feelings about what it means to walk around our cities and live inside our homes, the things that haunt us about our parents, the mayhem of culture and capitalism.” “Ari Aster shows us a Kafkaesque nightmare not unlike the one we are living through today,” Parker Posey, who plays the adult version of Beau’s lifelong love interest Elaine, said in the production notes. “He needs to just get some therapy,” Phoenix interjects.Īs for the anarchic nature of the city-named Corrina, according to Aster, in reference to the 1994 Ray Liotta movie Corrina, Corrina-what we see is likely more a product of Beau’s anxieties than a true interpretation of reality.īut other literary influences also abound, ranging from Franz Kafka to Jorge Luis Borges to Virgil to Laurence Sterne to Miguel de Cervantes to Tennessee Williams. It was a big distraction in pre-production just coming up with really stupid names for things, titles for fake movies and names for fake products and fake band names…You see names of bands like ‘Anal Puke,’ ‘Death By Anal,’ ‘Murder By F-ck,’ ‘Butt Finger.'” “And part of the fun for me was how many details we could cram into the frame. “I learned this term ‘chicken fat,’ which is the idea of jamming the background with as many gags as possible,” he says. Specifically referencing a drawing of “a penis in a tuxedo vomiting,” Aster says that the only rule for these gimmicks was that they had to reflect his sense of humor. Nearly every surface we see as Beau makes his way home to his sparse, lonely apartment is covered in graffiti or lewd advertisements-details that Aster says he continued to add throughout the filming process. “It’s unpleasant in all the ways that our world is unpleasant,” Aster says. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |