The same Oedipus – Kommersant

The absurdist tragicomedy Beau Is Afraid by Ari Astaire is a tediously detailed encyclopedia of fears and complexes of a middle-aged white cisgender man. Julia Shagelman The struggle of the author of the film with the unbearable complexity of life left me indifferent.

“Bo is afraid” is the original title of the film. And Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), balding and graying, but at any given time most like a confused child, is really afraid of: drafts, his neighbors in a dysfunctional area, poisonous spiders, side effects from drugs, maniacs that are on the news , stomach cancer, which can happen if you accidentally swallow mouthwash. Sex, finally. He owes this last fear to his mother Mona (Patty Lupon), who repeatedly told little Bo that his father died at the time of his, Bo, conception – his heart could not stand the orgasm. This, according to his mother, he passed on to his son, therefore, at his far from young age, Bo remains a virgin. And is it necessary to explain that most of all he is afraid of his mother – a tough business woman who never tires of reminding how much she sacrificed to raise her son alone. Bo’s sessions with a psychoanalyst (Stephen Henderson), to whom he has been going for many years, are mainly devoted to discussions of the parent, although there is no particular progress in his condition.

The main theme of the session, which we witness at the beginning of the film, is the upcoming annual visit to the mother on her wedding anniversary (and also the death of her father and her own conception). To refuse, of course, is impossible: Bo does not want to offend mommy? But as if in order to confirm the validity of all his fears, obstacles arise one after another on the way to the parental home: after having a bad night, Bo does not hear the alarm clock, then the keys to the apartment and his suitcase are stolen from him, then the apartment is seized by a crowd of outcasts there is a hellish party in it, and the next morning he learns that his mother, without waiting for his arrival, died as a result of a wild accident. Now he has to be in time for the funeral, but Bo, who jumped out into the street in what his mother gave birth to, is attacked by the same maniac from the news, and, finally, he is hit by a car. However, this is just the beginning of his odyssey, although the audience, of course, already guessed that the story of Bo refers to a completely different ancient Greek character, the one after whom the whole complex was named.

This is not the first time Ari Aster, a child prodigy and favorite of the fashion studio A24, one of the pillars of the “new horror”, has turned to the dark background of traditional family hierarchies. He did this in his short films preceding his debut film “Reincarnation” (2018), the main character of which was, of course, a demonic mother (and somewhere in the depths of the subconscious, a demonic grandmother also hid). Solstice (2019) was more about intergender relationships (with this film, Aster, by his own admission, closed his gestalts from parting with his girlfriend), but even there it all started with a daughter who killed her parents and committed suicide.

“All Bo’s Fears” does not particularly add anything to the picture of the world drawn by the director in these films: the family is not a source of warmth and support, but of existential horror; heredity, literal and metaphorical, is a heavy burden from which one cannot escape; men are weak and dependent creatures, women are dominant, domineering and always, always winning in the war of the sexes, even if posthumously. In the new tape, however, all these ideas are presented through the prism of grotesque humor, sometimes quite specific: as if a textbook on psychoanalysis was crossed with a collection of Jewish jokes.

The film is full of witty insights, and the first third of it, shot in the jittery rhythm of a high-temperature nightmare, really holds the attention. However, then the course of the picture slows down, Bo finds himself first an unwilling guest of a frighteningly friendly couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane), then in the forest, where a traveling theater troupe gives performances, he lives a fantasy about what his life would be like if he met his soul mate. But everything that could be learned and understood about this hero has already been said before, and constant repetitions, along with a heap of new images illustrating all the same thoughts, begin to tire. By the third hour of this bloated, like Leviathan, opus, there is neither the strength nor the desire to react even to the most shocking tricks Astaire has in store. I would only sincerely hope that the director’s mother will not watch this movie, otherwise he will probably be in big trouble.