The insane asylum film genre seems utterly incapable of producing anything that sits firmly in the center of the bell curve; what comes out of it is either brilliant or awful, with the awful being just that and only that and not awful in that wonderful way that some films can be. Out of the first category come things like "House of Fools" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and the slightly lesser but still admirable "Quills" among several others. At the other end of the bell emerge films like "Beg!"
There seems to be a toybox of images and affects that filmmakers pick and choose from when piecing together their vision of an insane asylum. It appears that the makers of Beg! raided the toybox in drunken madness, and took everything out and threw it into the big jumble that is this film. But as is often the case with drunken projects, the end result looks just like the mess that it always was. The non-drunken audience will not be fooled; however the drunken audience is just that - a drunken audience; drunk on bad imagery, inaudible dialogue, and their own pretensions.
If you choose to subject yourself to a bad insane asylum movie by purpose (I did not), then I do not think that I am spoiling anything by telling you what you will see. You will see the garish but fuzzily muted colors that unimaginative filmmakers seem to think represents the clouded yet energetic lunatic mind, the fuzzy colors that are supposed to let you know that you are seeing the world through the eyes of one deranged. Of course, with this timeworn modus operandi comes the notion that anybody connected with the lunatic world long enough comes to see everything in the same muted shades; ie., just who is the sane one anyway? Gee - that's a novel proposition. Never thought of that one before. And with this tactic comes the inevitable lack of much else in the way of a story or a reason for being - anything goes, since it's from the looney perspective. Anything can make sense, anything can be explained away. Who needs to understand (or even HEAR) the dialogue? Just look at the face of the tortured singer. That explains it all, right? RIGHT? Now, I'm not saying that a great movie needs to make sense. It certainly does not. Hell, "Yellow Submarine" makes no sense and it's gloriously enjoyable. Fellini made many films that, for many people, fall into the "makes no sense" category. And even those who think that they understand everything that Fellini did probably have most of it wrong, if he ever really "meant" anything with them anyway (I prefer not to look for sense, but that's just me). However, even Fellini's "worst" films were one thing that Beg! could never be - interesting. A poorly executed film that is in no way interesting is a waste of time and space; actually it's even worse than that, it can suck the life right out of a person for an hour or two that that person is never going to get back.
If I had to compare this to one film, one that seems to have the same feeling on the surface of it, it would be the French "Delicatessen." It's not really a fair comparison - Delicatessen is a great movie where Beg!, well, sucks. And although Delicatessen is not about an insane asylum, if any film ever explored that oh-so-fine line between sane and insane then it is Delicatessen, with its images of "normal" people who were quite "normal" before the bomb dropped and now seem to have no qualms about eating dead family members. That one takes quite the trip into the human psyche. I use Delicatessen as a yardstick for Beg! in part because Beg mines the same territory, but mainly because Beg! has the very same look and feel that Delicatessen did. When the first reel of Beg! started rolling I was immediately transported back to the same emotional place that Delicatessen exists in and for a brief few moments thought that I had stumbled onto another great one. But it soon panned out to show that I had not. It's as if Delicatessen was a sort of "PhotoShop filter" and the makers of Beg! applied it liberally to their movie. But anyone who is familiar with PhotoShop knows that no amount of filtering will make a truly bad and boring photo good and interesting. You can get the same fuzzy muted colors but they don't go anywhere. Like Beg!.
