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Rating: Imagine being a child, and that this story is yours. Proceed backwards. Open your eyes to the reality, eyes into which everything enters and from which nothing exits. Black holes, flowers of purity.
You play with your siblings in your village (you know it's West Africa, nothing more) immersed in a magnificent, almost infinite landscape. The camera moves in a documentary style, heart pounding. It captures you as you run in a world sprinkled with stars. Things you get used to, that after a while no longer have anything special, but that Fukunaga manages to bring back to us through the tender and watery eyes of Agu.
Until a door opens along his path, and into this story enters violence, absurdity, loneliness, and pain, to the point of making the enchanting nature and landscape that surround it surreal. For this reason, watching “Beasts of No Nation” (2015) is a punch to the stomach, more like a flurry of punches to the stomach. Don't listen when I scream. Close your eyes while they rape and abandon. While they drug you and force you to kill. Have mercy at least on yourself, protect your imagination, try to return to a past that never really happened (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”). This whisper here rises to a universal cry, in all the nations of a world willed by God of which children are necessarily a part, from which they have never been separated. Not even the approximately 250,000 child soldiers (according to War Child estimates) who fight for rebel groups in countries like India, Colombia, Burma, Thailand.
In this story (indebted to American cinema about Vietnam –“Eyes Wide Shut”, “Apocalypse Now”– and about Afghanistan –“Hyena Road”– and Malick's last decade, from “The Tree of Life” onward) it becomes particularly difficult to go back, to an origin, to a primitive and sweetest form of love, because the cause of the events seems to lie at infinite depths, in the abysses of the mind and fate. Where even monsters find their reasons, behind thick shadows. Giants like the charismatic Commandant (Idris Elba), placed here alongside boys like the small and malleable Agu or his mute friend, the even smaller and more fragile Strika. Privileged points of view, which director Cary Fukunaga provides us with again after the beautiful story of redemption “Sin Nombre” and the first season of “True Detective”, managing (again) to dilute our indifference and intolerance towards despair, reserving us a seat in the audience, seated in the front row, close to the most evident manifestations of inhumanity.
Returning to viscerally live the fear, the inexplicable pain of a child, we see again the monster that literally destroys everything in its path, in a hypnotic and tragic odyssey of childhood that becomes an apocalypse (“True Detective”, but also “Hap & Leonard”, “The Road” or “The Crossing” by Cormac McCarthy, the new “You Were Never Really Here”. There was isolation, perversion, sick fantasies and collective delusions, distorted epics and acid rains). Everything remains in the shadows, but you can also use these shadows to erode what casts them. Agu would disappear inside the mortifying, useless, and absurd theater of horrors that man has set up for him if his eyes did not dominate the landscape around them. In his endless sadness, the frightened child who looks at the world remains immersed in that still liquid, almost fantastic dimension that gives his gaze hope and fullness.
It is as if new times are bringing with them the seeds of new visions, predisposed to enter us with more or less violence, on a subliminal, almost unconscious level, and modify our consciousness (it is not yet clear whether to transform us into dreaming sheep -I think of Philip Dick or the androids of “Westworld”- or superior intelligences, increasingly evolved). Because by now, it seems there is no longer any truth outside of the narrative. Perhaps, only in this way, every story will (finally?) become ours.
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