After being swamped with plaudits from nearly every other film festival going, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the story of a six year-old girl battling an apocalyptic storm and the return of prehistoric creatures, saw its UK premier at the London Film Festival yesterday (Friday 12 October).
The star Quvenzhane Wallis and director/co-writer Benh Zeitlin were on hand to talk about the film. They appeared shyly uncomfortable at the attention their movie was generating.
Which is perhaps no surprise. This is Zeitlin’s first feature and the critics have raved about his production and its qualities.
When asked he simply said he had tried to capture the way a child sees the world and the character of the community in which his tale is based. His theme, he said, was how children connect apparently unrelated events and then, somehow, place themselves at the centre. He spent months writing in a coastal town getting to know its characters and their motivations before finalising his script. His film is even dedicated to one of those he got to know, the man lent his name to one of the film’s characters, Wink.
Intriguingly critics have struggled to identify his movie’s influences. Zeitlin, when asked virtually brain dumped all the films he had ever seen, though he did appear to place a stress on the films of John Cassavetes and I’m sure he also said Mike Leigh and his approach to getting the best out of actors. That said, he might also have name checked Spike Lee. I was a long way from the stage. Actually, as far as it’s possible to be at the Odeon West End.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is very difficult to pigeon hole, perhaps one of the reasons why it has been so widely praised. It has some unique qualities. Here's my review. Don't hesitate to comment.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (12A)
General UK release 19 October. Showing as part of the BFI London Film Festival on 13 and 14 October.
Director Benh Zeitlin should prepare for a big future. Not only will Hollywood deluge money on him after the praise heaped on his first feature Beasts of the Southern Wild, but if this isn’t the mainstay of film school studies for years to come it's difficult to imagine what will be.
It’s entirely possible that Beasts will end up representing a new moment for cinema, a watershed when disparate techniques came together to create an unexpected new form.
Hushpuppy and her father Wink live the wrong side of the levee on a Louisiana delta in the remote community of Bathtub. Populated with eccentrics, hippies, drunks and the alienated, the people here live on the margins. Unregulated and largely ignored by the state, they forge their own unstructured, unfettered lives. But they also live in fear of the next big storm, or the melting ice caps, that will so easily loosen their purchase on the tiny bit of land and Cyprus swamp they call home.
The storm comes, the world floods, prehistoric beasts rise and this becomes the story of Hushpuppy’s effort to come to terms with this new world, what it means and the failing health of her irascible father.
So much has already been written about Beasts, so much of it eulogising the film’s qualities, that it is difficult to find something new to say. But the facts are unavoidable. It is lyrical, heart breakingly beautiful, touching and affecting.
But as a film it has so much more. Beasts plays with notions of reality and style.
On the one hand it appears like documentary film with shaky hand-held cameras, grainy film and naturalistic settings and acting. And yet, just as in a child’s psyche, it toys with what is and isn’t real as it resurrects long-dead monsters and offers up a location that seems otherworldly, indeed quite literally at the end of the world. In conjuring up this fantastical place Beasts attains a folkloric quality and drops the shackles of the modern world and all its modern mores.
Zeitlin has cleverly allowed his protagonist to be the creator of this world. After hearing tales of a looming apocalypse Hushpuppy fears she herself may be responsible for the storm and her father’s illness. It is from this that the story flows. We see the world as she sees it, and we gradually fear what she fears. And strangely she is not overly concerned by the tempest and the flood. Hushpuppy stoically dreads what all small children fear - the loss of her parents. Her mother, long since gone, has become an imaginary friend that Hushpuppy confides in. All she has is Wink, her father, and her fear.
Zeitlin allows action and events to do the talking. Dialogue is sparse. When it comes it is often Hushpuppy’s own insights, which somehow achieve a level of honesty and profundity that could only come from a child.
Of course, it can be no accident that Hushpuppy’s challenge is a flood. In choosing a watery calamity Zeitlin and co writer Lucy Alibar not only draw on current ecological concern, and echo events in New Orleans, but offer a Biblical analogy of disaster. Just as man’s behaviour was the cause of the problem for Noah, it is man’s levee that is the problem for Hushpuppy and her friends. It assumes the role of oppression, one which Wink and his friends confront in a bid to save their home and freewheeling way of life.
That said, the environmental concerns never overshadow Hushpuppy’s story and her search for understanding. They remain in the background allowing the performances to dominate the narrative. And dominate they do. Quvenzhane Wallis, as Hushpuppy, appears to live her character with complete ease while Dwight Henry, a New Orleans cafe owner, is disturbingly convincing as her volatile father. When he blows it is explosive and surprising each time it happens. Both are in their first films and that Zeitlin should have coaxed these performances from them is testament to skills as a director that go way beyond his experience.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is that rarity in cinema, a movie that will have you wistfully pondering its meaning for long after the final frame has faded from the screen. Don’t miss it, you may be missing a significant bit of film history.
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