Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild
19.10.2012 - Critics and audiences around the
world have fallen in love with Beasts of the Southern
Wild, and especially with its pint-sized, lionhearted six-year-old
protagonist Hushpuppy. Rolling Stone calls Benh Zeitlin's debut
feature, screening in ADFF's New Horizons Competition, "a
game-changer that gets you excited about movies again," and Empire
magazine says it is "Beautiful, funny, timely and tender… the
American arthouse movie of the year." It's been scooping up awards
around the world, too, including the Grand Jury Prize for US
Narrative and a cinematography award at Sundance; four prizes at
Cannes, including the Camera d'Or for best first feature; and the
Audience award at the Los Angeles Film Festival, to name a
few.
I, for one, was hurriedly wiping the tears away from my eyes as
the house lights went up at the end of the screening I attended
earlier this month at BFI London Film Festival. Few films have
enraptured me as much as this one did. For me, it's what cinema is
all about: I was totally lost in the world of the Bathtub, a mythic
bayou community beyond the levee that is supposed to protect a
nearby city from flooding. We are meant to be reminded of New
Orleans, which is where Zeitlin (a New Yorker) is now based and
where the film was produced, but the setting is kept deliberately
vague to preserve the film's atmosphere of fantasy. Zeitlin has
managed to put on screen a world that is simultaneously magical and
viscerally real.
At the heart of the film is the incredible performance by
Quvenzhané Wallis, who plays Hushpuppy. When production started she
was just five years old. She's equally vulnerable and tough and
it's impossible to take your eyes off her. Zeitlin put her at
the heart of the shoot too: the film is told through her eyes, and
Zeitlin consulted her constantly in order to understand how she was
interpreting what was going on and what she was focused on. For
instance, when he asked her what she was listening to on the set,
he discovered she tended to focus on small, specific sounds and
that informed the sound design. Her perspective lends the film a
magical realism: the threat of her father dying and her home being
taken away morphs into fear of prehistoric beasts thawed from the
melting ice caps. The narrative has the quality of a dream.
Underneath it all, are some critical contemporary issues,
especially having to do with our damaged environment, of the sort
that give us all real nightmares.
Beasts of the Southern Wild screens at VOX Cinemas,
Marina Mall on Friday 19 October at 2:30 pm.
Robyn Evans