Beauty Must Suffer

“Beauty Must Suffer” is an homage both to J.K. Huysmans’ novel, “Against The Grain,” and to the personal experience of a weekend spent with Andy Mantegna, a porn star whose rise was just as quick as his descent and subsequent death. The film attempts to approximate the hazy memory of that debaucherous weekend in 1994 among the garish grandeur of an old Victorian flat saturated in baroque décor. The setting’s opulence could not have contrasted more with my larger life context at the time, I was living in a van, with just a backpack full of belongings, including Huysmans’ novel. “Beauty Must Suffer” presents a kaleidoscopic depiction of this convoluted dreamscape, combining the worlds of Huysmans’ novel and the weekend with Andy. Andy’s image is used -multiplied, extended, and distorted- to portray his, Huysman’s, and my own struggle with the pleasures and pitfalls of aesthetic immersion.