#770 - Beasts of No Nation
Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2015
A young West African boy is separated from his family and forcibly recruited into an army of Nigerian soldiers.
Beasts of No Nation tells the story of a young boy named Agu (Abraham Attah), who starts the film as an inhabitant of a village in an unspecified West African country. He lives a simple but pleasant life even as distant wars threaten to encroach upon his small hometown. However, the peace is shattered when the war reaches the village and, after being separated from his mother and younger siblings, he is made to escape when Nigerian soldiers start rounding up and shooting all the able-bodied men in the village. It's not long after he escapes that he is found by a unit of the Nigerian Defence Force, led by an intimidating figure known only as "the Commandant" (Idris Elba). Agu is then forced to join their cause and is brainwashed into becoming a child soldier who will help the NDF take what is rightfully theirs. So begins a staggering film that covers an especially brutal conflict through the eyes of a child who has his own war raging inside his head as he struggles to make sense of the world around him.
Having a film be so dependent on a child's performance is always a gamble, but newcomer Attah proves as good a centre to build the film around as any as he sells Agu's reluctant progression from happy-go-lucky child to traumatised soldier, maintaining his inner humanity even without the pointed narration reflecting his innermost thoughts. In a film as full of senseless atrocity as this one is, he proves a good constant and we are definitely invested in seeing just how he gets through each situation (if not necessarily expecting him to get out of it). Elba is definitely the most famous performer in the film and thus liable to be the one that most audiences will take notice of, but even if he was a complete unknown it'd still be hard to disregard his turn as the Commandant - if anything, the fact that I find it hard to believe that I'm watching Elba arguably speaks to the strength of the performance. His natural charisma makes him an ideal choice for the role of the fiercely mesmerising Commandant, whose callous tendency towards cruel and unusual execution (whether carried out by himself or by goading his young charges into doing it for him) is matched only by his hidden soft side still having an uncomfortably predatory air to it at best.
In the hands of Fukunaga (who I mainly know for directing the first season of HBO's incredibly grim procedural drama True Detective), Beasts of No Nation becomes quite the powerful piece of work. There is a plethora of techniques involved in portraying the conflict that also reflect Agu's inner state in the process, whether it's through jagged editing reflecting the confusion of being torn from his family or a long take that bobs and glides as he goes through a variety of incompatible emotions after discovering a woman who he initially thinks is his mother (resulting in one scene that is especially unsettling even by the harsh standards of the rest of the film). The amount of work that goes into staging and filming various skirmishes can be noted quite well as a result, especially those that involve complicated weaponry or explosions. Fukunaga captures it all with a visual flair that manages to provide captivating compositions of light and colour without even remotely glamourising anything that's actually taking place; such is the inherently contradictory nature of this fundamentally disturbing but well-crafted film.
Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2015
A young West African boy is separated from his family and forcibly recruited into an army of Nigerian soldiers.
Beasts of No Nation tells the story of a young boy named Agu (Abraham Attah), who starts the film as an inhabitant of a village in an unspecified West African country. He lives a simple but pleasant life even as distant wars threaten to encroach upon his small hometown. However, the peace is shattered when the war reaches the village and, after being separated from his mother and younger siblings, he is made to escape when Nigerian soldiers start rounding up and shooting all the able-bodied men in the village. It's not long after he escapes that he is found by a unit of the Nigerian Defence Force, led by an intimidating figure known only as "the Commandant" (Idris Elba). Agu is then forced to join their cause and is brainwashed into becoming a child soldier who will help the NDF take what is rightfully theirs. So begins a staggering film that covers an especially brutal conflict through the eyes of a child who has his own war raging inside his head as he struggles to make sense of the world around him.
Having a film be so dependent on a child's performance is always a gamble, but newcomer Attah proves as good a centre to build the film around as any as he sells Agu's reluctant progression from happy-go-lucky child to traumatised soldier, maintaining his inner humanity even without the pointed narration reflecting his innermost thoughts. In a film as full of senseless atrocity as this one is, he proves a good constant and we are definitely invested in seeing just how he gets through each situation (if not necessarily expecting him to get out of it). Elba is definitely the most famous performer in the film and thus liable to be the one that most audiences will take notice of, but even if he was a complete unknown it'd still be hard to disregard his turn as the Commandant - if anything, the fact that I find it hard to believe that I'm watching Elba arguably speaks to the strength of the performance. His natural charisma makes him an ideal choice for the role of the fiercely mesmerising Commandant, whose callous tendency towards cruel and unusual execution (whether carried out by himself or by goading his young charges into doing it for him) is matched only by his hidden soft side still having an uncomfortably predatory air to it at best.
In the hands of Fukunaga (who I mainly know for directing the first season of HBO's incredibly grim procedural drama True Detective), Beasts of No Nation becomes quite the powerful piece of work. There is a plethora of techniques involved in portraying the conflict that also reflect Agu's inner state in the process, whether it's through jagged editing reflecting the confusion of being torn from his family or a long take that bobs and glides as he goes through a variety of incompatible emotions after discovering a woman who he initially thinks is his mother (resulting in one scene that is especially unsettling even by the harsh standards of the rest of the film). The amount of work that goes into staging and filming various skirmishes can be noted quite well as a result, especially those that involve complicated weaponry or explosions. Fukunaga captures it all with a visual flair that manages to provide captivating compositions of light and colour without even remotely glamourising anything that's actually taking place; such is the inherently contradictory nature of this fundamentally disturbing but well-crafted film.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0
I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.