The Most Beautiful Boy in the World [2021]: ‘Sundance’ Review – The fading fallacy and ignorance of stardom

Luchino Visconti was one of the founding fathers of Italian neorealism. It was a movement in film history that actually changed the ways in which films were made thereafter. He was also one of the first openly gay men in the entertainment business. However, this film is not about him. Nor is it about his hard, condensed nature of getting things done his way. It’s about Björn Andrésen – a 15-year-old boy who shot to stardom overnight when he was first introduced to the world by the director during the premiere of his film Death in Venice at the Cannes Film Festival. He termed him as ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ – a phrase that not only echoed through his life but also haunts his dark, ghost-like existence to this day.

Co-directors Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri’s documentary is about people’s obsession with beauty. About how absolute beauty can be equated to death because there’s nothing beneath the surface that’s visible to the bystanders. It’s a piercing look at stardom and how its happenstance can lead to an entire lifetime of destroyed emotional responses.

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However, there’s more to The Most Beautiful Boy in the World than the directors lead you into. It gets into darker, murkier, and depressing terrains. It packs up one tragedy after another as if unloading you with too much to handle. What begins as a ghostly walk down nostalgia lane for Bjorn Andersen gets more personal as it moves on. We open with the audition tapes from back in Death in Venice days and while everything seems okay on the first look, a replay of certain sequences gives a different light.

The objectification that Björn – a 15-year-old boy suffered back then disturbs you. Even after considering artistic freedom from Visconti’s point of view and his ability to bestow the young boy with a cult-like status, the ignorance shown from everyone including Visconti to Björn’s own grandmother chills you to your bones. The fact that no one cared about where the boy was coming from or what his ambitions and livelihood were like, cries to a lack of empathy in the entertainment industry. Considering people as objects and money-making commodities is something that the industry has been guilty of for decades.

The directors use archival footage with a full-blown present-day look at the boy whose life is weathered down into a mess. He is a grown man with full-length white hairs down his shoulders but the loss of innocence weighs down on his gentle, embrace-worthy presence. Something tells us, it has something to do with his early touch at stardom – a thing he never asked for. However, the director duo takes their time to peel off layers and layers of trauma buried under that shadowy figure that Bjorn has become. From the disappearance of his mother to the secrets that were kept away from him, the doc suddenly becomes more personal and depressing.

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The film explores the feeling of abandonment and disjointment because of unprocessed grief. It is more profound than you can imagine – even when the narrative shifts may feel unprecedented and not sequential to the flow. The fact that Bjorn wanted to be someplace or someone else other than himself when he got famous tells a lot about how different people perceive emotions. It also talks about how everyone just assumes that fame is only leading one’s life higher up on the pedestal. Internal turmoil is often overlooked and considered rudimentary. In a way saying how mental instability is still considered a social construct.

The Beautiful Boy is the World skims through the themes of loneliness, in spite of being surrounded by people we love. The feeling of being invisible formulates a pretty poetic and poignant corner of Bjorn’s life that is full of darkness. While filmmakers Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri take a pretty exploitative approach to the material – sans setting the tone around dark allies and ominous score, they manage to dissect the character at hand with great perception. In spite of falling a little short of their aims, this is pretty decent documentation of a life that talks about people’s obsession with beauty and their inability to not look beyond what they see on the surface.

★★★

Trailer

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Director(s): Kristina Lindström, Kristian Petri
Editor(s): Hanna Lejonqvist, Dino Jonsäter
DOP: Erik Vallsten
Composer(s): Anna von Hausswolff, Filip Leyman
Country: Sweden
Language: Swedish, English, French, Japanese
Runtime: 94 Minutes
Links: IMDb