Beasts of THE Southern wild

Benh Zeitlin

‘Once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her Daddy in the Bathtub...’

For a few months now, I’ve had an image burned onto the back of my eyelids. A little girl – wild hair, blue shorts, white tank top – hurtles through a corridor of forest trees. Her skin glows in the blaze of two fireworks, streaming light from their tips like flaming rain. The colours are rich - green, blue, brown, gold. It’s not the kind of scene you forget in a hurry. And it’s

exactly the reason why Beasts of the Southern Wild picked up the Caméra d’Or at this year’s Cannes. In one of 2012’s most unique cinematic offerings, Behn Zeitlin’s Court 13 collective brings us the story of a young girl, Hushpuppy, who lives in the Bathtub, a Southern bayou community built in the shadow of a giant levee system. It’s an obvious hat-tilt to post-Katrina New Orleans, an environment which faces destruction at any moment. When an apocalyptic rainstorm threatens to annihilate everything they hold dear – as well as releasing a collection of prehistoric beasts from the polar ice caps – Hushpuppy and her neighbours have to pick up the pieces and fight to survive.

Words and DesignAvalon Lyndon

‘a perfect mix of whimsical idealism

and feet-on-the-ground dauntlessness’

and feet-on-the-ground dauntlessness’

you might see her, say, lighting the hob with a flaming blowtorch, she’ll still hide under a cardboard box when the kitchen catches fire. She holds creatures up to her ear, tenderly listening for their tiny heartbeats, but she’d just as easily square up to those much bigger and stronger than her with an angry squeal and a one-way ticket to the gun show. Nice. In less careful hands, her precocious monologues and the film’s thread of magic realism could well have pushed it into the arena of the cloyingly saccharine. But its deep, layered characterisation elevates Beasts far beyond that.

Quvenzhané Wallis is jaw-droppingly good as Hushpuppy, the fierce little girl lumbered with an alcoholic father and a mother gone AWOL. And while there are a few shonky performances (perhaps forgivably from non-professional Dwight Henry as her father, Wink), the film is imbued with such a peculiar charm and vivid imagination that you’ll barely notice them. There are challenges to telling a story through the eyes of a child, but Zeitlin and Court 13 have managed to craft Hushpuppy into a perfect mix of whimsical idealism and feet-on-the-ground dauntlessness. So while

‘ineffably beautiful, with a homemade, shanty town feel’

She might seem fearless, but Hushpuppy is still a little girl; all she really wants is someone to look after her. So while “No Crying” might be the Bathtub’s motto, you’d have to have a heart carved out of flint not to be blinking away a few tears as you watch Hushpuppy and her friends dance with a group of adopted mothers on the soft-lit dancefloor of a brothel dive. It’s this grimy, luminescent ugly-pretty look that has carved out Beasts’ niche as one of the most visually impressive films of the year. Many of its shots are almost blown out with shining white light, somehow managing to turn the grubby, destroyed landscape into something ineffably beautiful, with a homemade, shantytown feel.

This is a community art project, and there’s a real a raggedy beauty to it. Every aspect has been thought through, laboured over, crafted with love, but somehow looks as if it’s all just fallen into place. You almost get the feeling Zeitlin and his crew just happened to stumble across this little community and decide to document it. It’s all topped off with a phenomenal soundtrack, all brass, swelling strings and accordions, which is genuinely worth your ticket price alone. You’ll be humming it for days. Beasts has a genuineness that can’t help but win you over. You’ll be cheering them on all the way through, and by the end you’ll probably wish you were right there in the Bathtub with them.