The word from the Venice Film Festival was that Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts Of No Nation is a riveting, beautifully captured, somewhat traumatizing portrait of a child’s experience of guerilla warfare in Africa, and no one’s idea of an easy sit or an engaging exotic adventure. Well, I saw Beasts last night at Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre, and it’s a masterful thing that demands everyone’s attention — often jarring and horrific and in very few ways “pleasant” but a churning, ravishing injection, a cauldron of mad-crazy intense, something undeniably alive and probing and deep-in-the-bush authentic. Yes, it’s horrific but never without exuberance or a trace of humanism or a lack of a moral compass.
And it’s been made, mind you, by a cultivated, cool-cat artist — a guy of moderate temperament who wears fashionable glasses and cool-looking sweaters (check the below photo I took last night of Fukunaga and Beasts star Abraham Attah at last night’s after-party) — but who holds back just enough but never wimps out, who jumped right in and shot the whole thing himself in Ghana over a mere seven weeks, a guy who knows how to whip up strange brews and visual lather.
We’ve all seen violent films that try to merely shock or astonish or cheaply exploit — Beasts of No Nation is way, way above that level of filmmaking. It’s often about cruel, horrifying acts but filtered through a series of moral, cultured, considered choices, about what to use and not use and how to assemble it all just so. And yet over half of Beasts is gripped by madness — a kind of fever known only by war veterans and particularly (as this is the specific focus of the film) by children who’ve been forced into killing by ruthless elders.
This is a major, triple-A-approved, Apocalypse Now-influenced African inferno flick — a real original, like nothing I’ve ever quite seen before, like nothing I knew how to handle. Steven Soderbergh is going to shit his pants when he sees it. Anyone who attends Sunday services at the Church of the Devoted Cinephile will have to grim up, man up and buy a ticket. (And that means women also.) It’s harsh and brutal but poetic — one of those films that’ll hold up a decade or two or a half-century from now. If you miss or avoid it you’ll be embarassed to admit this down the road.
A few days ago Variety‘s Justin Chang called Beasts “the rare American movie to enter a distant land and emerge with a sense of lived-in human experience rather than a well-meaning Third World postcard,” but to me it’s more that just a lived-in thing — it’s orchestrated and painted and cooked to a full boil. Start to finish it has a feeling of keen impulse mixed with carefully honed art.