Sundance: "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" review
Friday, January 29, 2021 at 5:50PM by Jason Adams
"In all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age." -- Death in Venice
The director Luchino Visconti was 64-years-young when he directed his rumination on youth and beauty seen from the opposite end of life. Death in Venice saw Dirk Bogarde vacationing in a plague-riddled seaside hotel where a teen-boy called Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) suddenly sends his overheated brain reeling across platonically idyllic places. And now here 50 years later, premiering at Sundance, comes the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which turns around and gives us Tadzio's perspective looking back. The sun doesn't shine as brightly from that direction...
Well if not Tadzio Björn Andrésen anyway, although that single acting role seems to have defined and terrorized his entire life. Andrésen is now 66, at the same place age-wise as was his former director when they first met, and Andrésen seems intent on closing the circle. Permanently, furiously. Dubbed the doc's title by the director on the press-tour -- where period footage reveals Visconti almost immediately retracting the compliment, saying the boy's already grown past his apex only a few months after -- Björn has spent five full decades under the shadow of the image of his former self; a curse far more than a blessing.
When co-directors Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri first meet up with Andrésen it's dark days indeed, as his girlfriend's scrubbing the walls of his filth-infested apartment before the landlady comes a'calling. He carelessly left the gas on and is on the verge of homelessness, but even as this reality confronts him he seems in a daze, unaffected by the severity of his situation -- only as the movie progresses and we reach back into his life's story do we come to understand all the ghosts sharing and stinking up that cramped space with him.
It reaches back further than fifty years, into Andrésen's childhood with his so-called "bohemian" mother who one day up and went missing; from there he was under the negligent care of a grandmother who just wanted a famous grandson, and who would seemingly would steer him anywhere so she could get it. Grandmother's the one that got Björn into that audition room where Visconti, much like Bogarde's character, lit up at the sight of the shy fifteen-year-old, and the footage of the director asking the boy to strip down for the camera is unsettling, to put it mildly. Especially the more we learn about how Björn got to that room, and all that would result from it. (A passage through Japanese fandom is especially baffling.)
One empathizes deeply with Andrésen and the trauma he's experienced, but there are some moments where his backwards-looking revulsion trends towards the homophobic -- the conversations surrounding gayness and teenage sexuality are obviously fraught ones (in different ways now than they were when Visconti was working, but just as fraught), and nobody should have allowed this kid near some of the situations he describes. But we are also here viewing a 66-year-old man describe a gay nightclub as literally Hell itself. It's an uneasy sequence, but the fault of course falls on all those in charge of this kid's well-being. They failed him, and fifty years later that failure has taken its deep and lasting toll.
Not that it's all in the rear-view -- those of us in the know knew who we were seeing that elongated mallet smash the face of in Ari Aster's Midsommar back in 2019; the revenge of the most beautiful boy, an old man getting his still-beautiful face smashed to pulp and ribbons, sacrificed on the altar of the cult of cinema itself. A fitting book-end, and one that seems to have brought Andrésen a degree of closure -- here's hoping that telling his story brings him some further peace as well. Our boats, borne ceaselessly into the past, beg for calm waters. Even an old person knows that.
Reader Comments (3)
Wow, not an easy life, but I appreciate how you modulated the usual fast pace of your reviews because you were dealing with a living person’s life, not something up on a screen.
Wow, beautifully written piece Jason.
Homophobia hurts. I say that as a gay man. But if I was Alain Delon or Björn Andrésen or whoever coming out of society that's generally homophobic to begin with and everywhere I went gay men were coming onto me, acting like, "you know, come on... nobody's completely straight, blah, blah", I'd probably turn out the same way,. Really attractive women can end up pretty fed up with straight men if everywhere they go the get accosted. Same thing.