Beholding Beatrix

by Amalia Rizos

Beatrix (2021), dir. Milena Czernovsky & Lilith Kraxner

Watching the new Austrian film Beatrix is akin to catching a dust particle midair and hanging onto its eased movement with compelled eyes. The film moves along in no particular rush and sways to no specific order; yet, it is always moving forward, sacredly, with the calm air of having nothing else to do. Slower-paced films have occupied a peaceful pocket of cinema for half of the medium’s history, stemming from favorites like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, and Tsai Ming-Liang. Two Austrian directors, Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner have seated their work next to these predecessors. Their new film, Beatrix, naturally transcends beyond the conventional model of structured narrative, definitive plot, and intentional character development. Thus, it exists in its own amusingly perfect pocket, one designed for people who take simple pleasure in perusal. 

Beatrix was shown in Film at Lincoln Center’s 2022 Art of the Real circuit. Czernovsky and Kraxner were in town to discuss their co-written and co-directed film, which was shot entirely on 16mm, a formal decision that empowered them to find creativity in the constraints analog filmmaking confounds. They began tracking what they would do when alone to write the script and realized that they both acted in very similar ways. This excited them to share these oft-hidden intimacies––eating cheese out of the fridge, assaulting a fan with a Q-tip, putting on colorful eyeshadows––with a broader audience to promote them, in their natural solitude, to being indulged in even further and farther. The film presents a woman named Beatrix, who is fit to be perused. In a summative line: Beatrix stays in a home that is not her own and is surrounded by trees rather than people or any bustling urbanity. This is more of an extended stay (for how long, we do not know) than a permanent living arrangement. She has visitors, and eventually, someone takes up a room. However, most of the time, she is alone, denotatively isolated as she ennuis her time away in the comfort of this home with just the camera to catch her actions. She eats, cleans, lies on the ground, cooks, sets the house up, eats some more, falls asleep on the couch, brushes her teeth, empties the vacuum, pulls food out of the sink drain, talks briefly with people on the phone, bounces on an inflated ball, lies in the grass, and eats again. 

To say that nothing happens in this film would be a gross misjudgment of the meandering story’s undiluted achievement of realizing meaning in each present moment. The film testifies to daily life without demands, to the in-between moments of our solitary biographies. We are lucky to be able to piece together this taciturn, mindful, languorous character of Beatrix, for she is all of us in a way. We are granted no profound insight into who she is psychologically and what she contributes to Austria’s arguably more pragmatic, capitalist model. There is no need for that here. At dusk smoking a cigarette out of her bedroom window without pants on is enough for Beatrix. And us, too.

This film reinforces––in an age where the movies which dominate the market orbit, quickly and viciously, around Bible-bending protagonists assembling in their machismo and their superhero ensembles––a cinema of slowness that proffers a much-desired area of reorder. Beatrix reminds us how everything is such a pleasure when allowed to be. When life slows down, deadlines cease, no one tells us what to do, and identity is allowed to exist fluidly. We can tend to our basic needs in these moments triumphantly and solitarily. In other words, Beatrix is a woman, a body, and a soul, which we see on the celluloid prioritizing her survival by herself, and taking whatever boredom that may elicit in many and turning it into amusing, worthwhile, stable humanity. Beatrix justifies existence without having to justify itself.