Review: Beauty

The most disturbing study of repression you'll see all year.

By Ryan Gilbey Published 18 April 2012

Every film is perfect during those few seconds after the lights go down, the curtains part and the projector starts whirring. Some maintain that high standard even longer. Beauty, a new South African picture that’s easier to admire than to like, is a work of considerable control, consistency and intelligence. From its masterful opening shot, we know we are in safe hands even as the director Oliver Hermanus leads us on to dangerous ground.

Like American Beauty, with which it almost shares its title, this is a story of a bored, middle-aged man obsessed with one of his daughter’s friends. There the similarity ends. Beauty begins at a wedding reception in Bloemfontein. The camera gazes out at the guests mingling, drinking, laughing. As the long lens creeps further into the crowd, a face emerges gradually as the focus of its attention – a sublimely handsome young man in his early twenties. A tentatively played piano makes itself heard, banishing other sounds and bestowing on the fellow an air of wistful romantic idealism. We are enchanted.

So is François (Deon Lotz). This married timber merchant is plainly dazzled by Christian (Charlie Keegan), a part-time model who is training to be a lawyer. Christian is a chum of François’s daughter and the son of one of his old army buddies. The lad is courteous, smart and eager to please: he talks cheerfully to François, deferring to his professional experience. He can’t see that the older man’s feelings towards him are defined by a desire both ravenous and resentful.

François is the beast in Beauty. He wears an amused smile that can’t conceal the disgust with which he regards the world, and himself. The one explicit glimpse we get of his secret sex life is characterised by weirdly outdated iconography – fuzzy VHS pornography, rather than the online variety, plays in the background of a scene that is a contender for the most unappetising sexual encounter this side of Salò – but the film is clearly reflecting François’s own rancid self-loathing, rather than wallowing in the sordid.

François’s temper is frighteningly close to the surface, like those outwardly placid businessmen who will tear off your arm at the shoulder if you jostle their Telegraph on the morning commute. Lotz is such a lucid actor that we would pick up on this even without his character’s visit to the doctor, where he is gently reminded how to keep his anger in check. “I haven’t lost control,” he protests, his words sore with scar tissue from past outbursts. The scene is muted, like the whole film, but you would need to be unconscious not to detect the sound of gnashing and churning.

Discovering that we have been looking through those eyes during the film’s first sequence induces at first a horrified shiver, like waking up to find you’ve been sharing your bed with a monster. It gets worse. François dominates every moment; if he’s not in a scene, we’re looking at it through his eyes: the camera keeps imprisoning us in that poisoned perspective, making us complicit in the manipulative plans he hatches to get what he wants. Nothing else intrudes. It’s less like sleeping with a monster than being physically possessed by one.

Films that attempt to immerse the viewer in a character’s warped psychology are ten a penny but Beauty is one of the most persuasive examples. It would be overrating the picture to put it in the company of Vertigo or Taxi Driver but it has more in common with the intoxicating, expressionistic style of those works than it does with superficial character studies such as the recent Shame or Michael. Everything in the film feeds into its central thesis of the malignancy of repression; there has been no more articulate cinematic study of the nature of homophobia.

Ben Ludik’s score suggests the gentler parts of Pino Donaggio’s work for Brian De Palma in movies such as Carrie and Dressed to Kill, the difference being that in Beauty the musical calm never builds to a storm; there’s no crescendo, no release. The film keeps a lid on its horrors. After everything finally boils over, that lid simply goes back on and the whole miserable cycle is ready to start again.

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Tags: film

10 comments

Wed, 2012-07-11 15:59 — nickol (not verified)

i agree !! great article
Yeah, Declan is totally right motorcycle jeans

Mon, 2012-05-21 17:24 — Robin Gales (not verified)

I thoroughly disagree that older people dislike to look at younger beauty because it's inaccessible. Wedding Dress looks great in 4 Weddings and a Funeral.

Tue, 2012-04-24 01:31 — soro1 (not verified)

I agree with "The odds of meaningful cinema experiences are stacked against us....", having seen many movies over the years. Not only is it that they tend to be meaningless, but they lend themselves to bolstering accepted views, fail to challenge, reinforce cliches. This is esp. true of historic films that just recycle the same old song in different guise. Still, I'll probably see this one: nothing else on, is there?

Tue, 2012-04-24 15:37 — Declan (not verified)

With films, anything is not better than nothing.

Sun, 2012-04-22 03:19 — Declan (not verified)

I thoroughly disagree that older people dislike to look at younger beauty because it's inaccessible. I'm 31 and don't have any great desire to be with - or, if I behave properly, any access to - 18 or 19... year olds. I think most people prefer to see younger ages the older they get. What you've lost becomes more beautiful. And you do have access, with your eyes and ears and platonic interaction. Ah...I altogether disagree with your point there. And all the beauty that is not about physical youth as well.

Fri, 2012-04-20 19:31 — Declan (not verified)

Ryan Gilbey starts his above article by saying ''Every film is perfect during those few seconds after the lights go down, the curtains part and the projector starts whirring''.

It's obvious that Ryan is sitting there in the cinema, over-excited, because he thinks one of the best moments of a film is something that is no part of the film. The only good thing about a film is what's good in the film. The best part about buying a book is reading something good in it, not taking it down off the shelf.

Taking it down off the shelf may be a lovely moment for a different reason, but it's nothing to do with good quality writing; just in the same way, it may be a delightful, anticipatory moment of escape when the cinema lights go down, the curtains noiselessly part, and the screen comes alive with aural-damaging fanfare and more bold, primary colours than are to be found in the spectrum. But it remains to be said, that has nothing to do with the film; that is all about the excitement of an impressionable viewer who's dying to find what's good in a rubbish film, as virtually all films are rubbish.

I certainly don't say listen to chamber music instead, which I can't stand. But it doesn't take a Wordsworth to know that a bird hopping from branch to branch outside your front door is more healthy and easeful for your mind that what happens in films - which are only highbrow due to a gigantic grotesque botox lift and hoist, more like.

Nothing needs to replace films. They don't leave a void in your life; that's like saying removing cancer cells leaves a void in your body.

Ryan Gilbey, and his fellow cineasts, are unreliable commentators. They declare it themselves, they're there to escape from themselves, not confront what they are and we are: his perfect moment is the curtain call and the dark room. Good luck. There's nothing to be learnt.

Fri, 2012-04-20 11:30 — Lulz (not verified)

Yeah, Declan is totally right. Films suck! God, go listen to a chamber orchestra, or play Angry Birds or something.

Thu, 2012-04-19 21:13 — Declan (not verified)

No, my friend, not WE, but YOU, were enchanted with the sublimely handsome young man with the look of wistful romantic idealism. When you grow up and aren't so blown away by a pretty face, you'll be far less enchanted and then, I can tell you, it'll be a happy day, you'll see how shallow films are. You're sitting there in your chair looking at a gigantic wall of images, your whole field of vision, and then your ear is flooded with supersound. Anaestheticism and aestheticism are poles apart.

But even on the small screen, the main point stands: that boy you were blown away by is just a pretty face.

Sun, 2012-04-22 02:08 — stegosaurus (not verified)

I see no reason not to appreciate a pretty face. They exist, so it would be silly not to enjoy them. As people get older, i think they prefer not to look at beautiful young people because they're generally inaccessible. It would be a very boring, very ascetic life if we refused to appreciate physical beauty.

Sun, 2012-04-22 03:12 — Declan (not verified)

I agree. I think, though, that Gilby was uncritically swept off his feet by the face. I think cinema can glorify or worship things. Not to say beauty isn't glorious. But I think films do other things; ask us to take for substance what is an empty seduction; to use all the special effects on show to barrage our senses with a pose, and the reaction is one of fawning - I've been guilty of it myself many times. The films induce it if one isn't wary, in a way that honest songs or books or other things don't. I mean, a pretty face, with nothing behind it, yet we're asked to still love the pretty face, even when we see nothing behind it because it's such an awful film, almost every time. If you're waiting for a film to give food for thought, you'd be a bone fossil in the desert before the food delivery parachutes down and lands on you. The odds of meaningful cinema experiences are stacked against us, I believe, after years of lapping it up.