Since her mother died, Suzu has experienced a physical and emotional confinement that seems to irremediably take her away from life. She looks around her with scattered eyes, full of pain for that loss that she still burns, as if she was unprepared to show herself to others for what she is, for the voice she can’t get out, for the love for her best friend who she can’t declare for fear of being rejected. Hence the need to rely on an app downloaded by five billion people named U, capable of fulfilling the frustrated aspirations of real life in a virtual world. This is where it starts Beautiful, the new film by the master of Japanese animation Mamoru Hosoda which, after passing through Cannes, finally arrives at the cinema on March 17 telling the story of a girl in search of her identity.
As well as in Piano lessons, Suzu can only bring out her true self by resorting to a virtual mask and a new identity: it’s about Belle, a hugely popular singer in the U universe whose personal details everyone ignores except her best friend, the only one who knows that Suzu is hiding behind her long pink hair and lunar pallor. In this continuous exchange between what is real and what is virtual, things get complicated when Belle meets a mysterious dragon called “the Beast” that will change everything: driven to discover the identity of the user behind him, Suzu / Belle will, in fact, be forced to come out once and for all from the isolation in which she had lived in seclusion for too long and finally get involved .
Beyond the clear reference to Beauty and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda seems more focused on telling the symbolic value of a mask and the effort that a teenager can do to offer herself to the gaze of others. The liquid eyes that still retain the pain of mourning become, in Beautiful, the means to obtain an existential redemption capable of leading to acceptance and, above all, to self-determination. In this sense, freeing yourself from the traumas of the past becomes the only means to emancipate yourself and defeat the sense of inadequacy that corrodes and devours Suzu / Belle to allow her to live her life as she deserves. The reality of U, a clear reference to the Ready Player One by Spielberg but also a little to the Metaverse, has a crucial value: only once we have abandoned the mask will we be able to heal the wounds of the soul. A valuable lesson that Beautiful embodies to perfection.
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Source: Vanity Fair
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