Psychostate – Weekend
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Ari Astaire’s bizarre film “All Fears Bo” is released. The apostle and star of post-horror offers to be frightened and laugh at all the fears of human life, absurd and careless. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, the film’s protagonist makes a crazy odyssey to get to his mother’s funeral, and the viewer follows him, gradually losing his mind and patience.
Bo Wassermann saw the light under a heart-rending motherly cry: “Why are you beating him!” – the doctor slapped the baby on the pope until he screamed. Mona Wassermann did everything to protect her son from future dangers. She was a truly loving mother. But Bo is no longer a baby. He is a gray-haired, balding man (Joaquin Phoenix) at a therapist’s appointment. He talks about his dreams, feelings and fears – for example, if he will get stomach cancer if he swallows a little mouthwash. The therapist tries to calm him down, but doesn’t do much, because Bo is afraid of literally everything in the world. He is afraid to go back to his apartment 303 and leave it, he is afraid to make his way to the house along his block while brutal tramps are chasing him, he is afraid to lose his keys, he is afraid not to drink accidentally prescribed pills or to open the door to the wrong person. It’s also scary when mom calls. Once a year they have obligatory meetings on the day of the death of their father, whom Beau never saw. You can’t hurt your mom.
However, maybe his fears are not so groundless? After all, the district is restless, a naked psycho killer roams the street with a knife, which is written about in the newspapers, and in the building where he rents a miserable apartment, a recluse spider has wound up, whose bites cause necrotic ulcers. Reality is as weird as Bo’s worldview. It is probably not for nothing that Ari Aster begins his picture with a birth scene; usually the sacrament of birth is turned into a joke by absolutely outrageous jokers – as Monty Python did in The Meaning of Life. What could be more surreal than life itself in the endless darkness of icy space?
If it weren’t for the sticky feeling of fear – Astaire makes the viewer share this feeling with the main character – “All Bo’s Fears”, at least in the first and best half of it, could be considered a comedy. Bo Wassermann goes to his mother’s funeral, but the viewer perceives this conflict as a welcome release. And I want to laugh rather than cry. Not only does the neurotic hero in incurable anxiety exist in the format of an eternal slapstick (he needs to withstand his nightmares, like Buster Keaton butted with the wind or Charlie Chaplin with a conveyor belt), his fears and obsessions themselves (they, of course, come from childhood, like all horror) spring from grotesque assumptions. For example, once in childhood, a mother convinced her son that it was the conception of Bo that caused his father’s early death: her husband’s chronically ill heart could not stand an orgasm (a plot worthy of the pen of the author of Tristram Shandy). And now Bo is afraid of sex like a fire. Gathering dust in his bedside table is a polaroid photograph of a girl, Elaine, whom he fell in love with on a cruise as a child and never called afterward. Bo is a virgin, but it’s absurd and absurd that Astaire doesn’t dare to bring up the subject of masturbation. One thought that orgasm, in principle, has nothing to do with intercourse, would destroy to hell the grandiose building of the film, which the author erects for three hours.
If “All Bo’s Fears” had to pick up a single verb that would describe their effect on the viewer, then perhaps the word “disconcerting” could become such. The film deprives the viewer of any critical apparatus with a truly masterful strike. Firstly, there is no time to think, the pictures change at a kaleidoscopic speed. Secondly, the author is prepared. Gazing from the presentation of psychoanalytic interpretations and motivations to the viewer (and really, is it really possible with such a serious face after “Psycho” to talk about the family duet “mother-son”?), he can suddenly slip the giant – slightly blurred in Russia – testicles of Bo getting out of the bath ( Lawrence Stern again in person) or Spiderman hovering on the ceiling, in principle, not hinting at anything. Do not take what is happening so seriously, as he says. And he himself clearly suffers from the fact that cinema is not immersive enough to reach out to a person.
Astaire is good at turning heartache into reality by interpreting emotional trauma in a body horror style, but he doesn’t need to shock you in this movie. Although the temptation to intimidate with the simplest and most effective methods, in a Kubrick-style, as in The Shining, is difficult for him to overcome. But it’s not enough to be afraid. On his hero, he brings down not only horror or black comedy, not only a thriller and a curious road movie, he invites him to the theater and to an animated matinee, gradually reaching pure pure trash – sorry for the spoiler, but wait, wait, wait three hours of the appearance of a giant animatronic penis in the finale. In one of the episodes of the film, a button appears at the disposal of the hero who escaped from the killer, on which is written “for anything!”. And, it seems, the author himself dreams of something similar – so that, as with a television remote control, with one click it would be possible to turn a harmonious narrative into a series of Dadaist visions. “All Fears Bo” is like such a device.
This is a strange device. But Astaire applies it in an area that he is familiar with. He has long been engaged in demonstrating painful, wild, indescribable family relationships and structures. In fact, he does this throughout his career: not so long ago there was “Solstice”, which began with a collective family suicide, before that – “Reincarnation” (in the original “Legacy”) about a witch grandmother and her unbearable genes. You can also remember the short film “Something Strange with the Johnsons”, where Astaire turned inside out the plot about sexual violence and incest – in this viral film, the son forced his father to have sex. “All Bo’s Fears” contains several family psychodramas at once: this is the story of Bo himself, who is trying to escape from maternal control, but cannot cope with innate obsessions, the story of a manic couple who picked him up on the road, who are trying to replace their son who died in the war with a stranger, and the performance troupe “Orphans of the Forest”, which tells about a man who lost loved ones and got lost in the forest. Lost, it seems, is Ari Aster himself, who made the film so cumbersome and defiantly absurd that with the final credits it predictably loses all meaning, turning into either a confession or an art therapy session. Real life, however, is even more absurd.
At the box office from May 4
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