According to Ari Aster, the public did not understand Beau is Afraid: “It’s frustrating…”
The director of Midsommar regrets the flop of his third feature film.
After Heredity And Midsommarthe third film ofAri Aster Beautiful is Afraid failed to find its audience, reaching only 67,326 admissions at the French box office at the end of its run. Produced by the prestigious A24 house with Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, he benefited from a substantial budget of 35 million dollars and only brought in 10 million, not making the film profitable.
Ari Aster expressed his disappointment about this again in an interview for Vanity Fair : “The film ends with a movie theater gradually emptying out during the credits of a film, with a very indifferent audience. I didn’t realize how prophetic this ending was going to be.” The director openly expresses his disappointment to see that the public did not try to go further in the analysis.
“What excites me about Beautifulis that there are certain things that I hid in the film that no one has talked about yet, and I was disappointed to see the way people approached it because their verdict came down to ‘Everything is not working’”. What the filmmaker responds to “Well, wait, what’s not working?”
Effectively, Beautiful is Afraid recounts Beau’s absurd and sometimes surreal odyssey (Joaquin Phoenix), a very anxious man who has to go to his mother (Patti LuPone). Ari Aster himself admits that he “deliberately blows up the entire movie” fully assuming that his work is a “experimentation”.
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It is precisely this experimental dimension which divided the public, a reaction whichAri Aster supports but which he hoped was more important: “I always knew this film was going to be polarizing and it was designed to divide”, he explains. This was not enough to attract more audiences, even though it isAster and the one where he went “the farthest”.
Ari Aster took a risk, and we must recognize this audacity: “I fantasize about a time when a film like that could come out and divide audiences, and it would have encouraged people to go see it and make up their own minds instead of saying ‘Oh I’ve heard about it everywhere, I won’t bother going.’ I knew that people were going to hate it or love it, and I hoped that it would open a debate rather than scare away the public and not give the film a chance.”
Will Beau is Afraid be able to catch up on DVD, VOD, and become cult over time? It is still too early to say… Despite this failure, Ari Aster is already committed to a future western project where he will find Joaquin Phoenix in leading role.
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