Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

It's strange when a film strikes you as very un-American and at the same time very American. Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Benh Zeitlin), a dreamy, imaginative film about people living on the edge of society, is precisely like that. It conjures up familiar themes that thousands of Hollywood movies have explored: where is the place that you call home and how can you return there? But another dimension of the film does not fit niecely with this feel-good message about community - Beasts of the Southern Wild tells a story that has nothing to do with the American dream; the people in the film does not want to live in normal, urban society. They live beyond the levies of New Orleans, a place that the authorities find unfit for inhabitants, as it is easily flooded. But the characters in the film - all of them poor people - do not want to leave. They fish, they take care of their animals, they socialize, they party, they go to school, they live. When they are forced to, because of a big storm, they are herded into an institutionalized world in which they are mere numbers, 'cases', to be governed. This might make it sound like a very political film and in some sense, it is. But it is also a film about a child and her relationship to her father. Its a rare portrait, tender, with very few gender stereotypes.

Is poverty romanticized? Somehow, I did not think it did, even though there are a few familiar characterizations - but what is not that common, is the film's depiction of poor people living in a surrounding that is not urban. How often do we see that in mainstream films? (but yes, it does tap into the tradition of portraying outsiders as more in tune with their world than the rest of society.) This is not a film attempting to present a realistic portrait of a class of poor people. It's not the socio-economic analysis that stood out for me (even though the way the society inside the levies was portrayed in a way Foucault would have liked): the film is an evocative, dreamy excavation of a child's perspective, a child's imagination and fears. I liked almost all of the more surreal scenes, the one involving strange animals, both dangerous and comforting, and the scene in the dream-like boat where people danced to a very haunting piece of music. In these scenes, the dreamy blended in with a sense of reality in a very nice way. Some have complained that Zeitlin has drawn too much on Terrence Malick, but for my own part, I would say that this was a better film than Malick's recent Tree of Life. Nature also has a central place in Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I actually think that Zeitlin renders nature with far more dimension than Malick does. In this film, nature is a source of wonder and beauty, but the beauty of the film is the beauty of mud and grass and the perspective changes abruptly from beauty to danger.

There were some flaws however. I felt that the film did fall apart to some extent towards the end, as the focus was on the Return. Here, simply too many familiar elements were used, too much bombastic music tried to make me Feel, and I sometimes started to feel what I sometimes feel when I watch American indie movies: overwhelmed, but I also feel a bit tricked. Sometimes, things simply get to cute - but this does not take away the fact that Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fierce film which mostly is not at all manipulative or cheesy.