The Beast

Though it's really way too long, I did rather enjoy the developing chemistry here between Léa Seydoux ("Gabrielle") and George MacKay's "Louis". The story isn't really structured, it's all largely dictated from her consciousness lounging in the bath of Guinness no longer needed by "Baron Harkkonen" where she is having her DNA cleansed. This is ostensibly to make her life happier and more fulfilled, to take the rough edges off disappointment and pain - and generally to turn her into a rather soporific drone. The thing is, whilst plugged in and gently soaking we discover that her brain isn't co-operating with the process and that she is having very lifelike fantasies - historical, contemporary and futuristic with the handsome and enigmatic "Louis". The story in itself isn't really up to very much. It's an episodic jaunt through what is/was/might be their lives - together and apart. What does work well is the ambiguity. The sense that artificial intelligence, either working on it's own or at the behest of humanity, can rearrange our thoughts and our memories. It can create as convincingly as it can delete comprehensively - and all because there is a sense that emotions are unpredictable, unreliable and therefore a threat to the stability of a new "natural order". The dialogue can meander into the realms of psycho-babble now and again which does detract from the subtle but clear thrust of the narrative, but it is actually quite a scary prognosis of what might become fact if we are not careful to protect what is real and important.

Beautiful costumes and stunning sets, amazing performance of the two main characters. An original and engaging screenplay that resonates with contemporary matters. A movie that raises intriguing questions about the evolution of technology and its role in modern society. Bonello appropriately explores the importance of emotions and affects : are they desirable or to be avoided at all costs ? This movie offers a captivating and enjoyable travel through time and ages, deserving to be appreciated at its right value. The only criticism I would offer is that I found it a bit lengthy towards the end, and, at times, it was difficult to follow and understand.

With RKO's horror films, Van Lewton, discovered a new cinematic terror, darkness, what you can't see. Now artificial intelligence, the metaverse, can create a reality that stalks you in an empty space, the invented reality, which can be an advertisement in which you end up hit by an invisible car or an acting test for a film in which you defend yourself with a knife from you really don't know what. Or it is a reality manufactured to satisfy our dreams, to erase misfortunes, to disguise that "other" reality in which our expectations are not met.

A world in which the objective is not to suffer, not to desire, to achieve an emotionally stabilized, more productive life, without error in decisions; a world where emotions are better left for dreams and that creates past lives tailored to your dreams, lives in which what goes wrong can always be eliminated, reworked into a better dream. A world in which the proof that you do not exist is that you have no digital footprint on the internet (well, this is no longer science fiction).

The protagonist is a pianist from the beginning of the 20th century who does not dare to abandon her husband and start a relationship with the man she has fallen in love with, because she has the feeling that a strange misfortune will destroy her or her lover if she does (again as in the RKO Cat People classic).

She is an aspiring actress model at the beginning of the 21st century, strangely incapable of maintaining the romantic relationship she needs, who makes a living taking care of other people's homes, just now a very luxurious one), in a world in which, once again, she finds herself, surprisingly, with the same man she always falls in love with, now another young man unable to dare to maintain a relationship.

Time and time again things seem to put love within reach, but for whatever reason, those realities end up being somewhat tricky, and readjust themselves until tragedy always arrives.

The protagonist is also (especially?) the young woman of a future with empty streets, advised by artificial intelligence, whose friends are robot dolls, and who wears virtual reality glasses. This young woman is dissatisfied with her job, unable to promote to a better one for being too human, and does not know whether to opt for an erasure of her past lives and eliminate traumatic experiences, at the risk of... ceasing to be herself. She is a young woman for whom that ataraxia is not really atractive, who does not want to renounce to imperfectly authentic emotions, and in that world of the future...there is that nightclub that dresses up in a different decade style every night, and where she surprisingly finds again the young man with whom she is obsessed.

La Bete is clearly indebted to the universe of David Lynch, especially Inland Empire and its matryoshka game (dolls within dolls, realities within realities), although now explained for all audiences and with a bath of conventionality, without the background, authenticity nor the infinite number of interpretations of Lynch (and certainly without his poetry), a safer and less authentically unsettling territory. We also get the awakening of Mulholland Drive, Roy Orbison's songs as in Blue Velvet, and even Laura Palmer's final scream.

There is also something of the existential terror of Blade Runner (or Do Androids dream of electric sheep?) and we could continue with many other borrowings.

But the truth is that these three hours fly by and keep you continually intrigued in a plot that never gets lost in ramblings and that likes to tie up all the ends. An intelligent science fiction film, with a very attractive and careful aesthetic, and which benefits from the magnificent performance of Léa Seydoux.

Director Bertrand Bonello's "The Beast" is not for the faint of heart. It's daring, divergent, disorienting, occasionally bombastic and frustrating - in short, very French. Voila, mes amis!

The film is based, loosely, on Henry James' 1903 novella "The Beast in the Jungle." In this eighty-page short story, James suggests that the beast represents our own fear. James believed that personal fear causes an overwhelming sense of dread about the future accompanied by a sense of impending personal catastrophe, sensations that annihilate the possibility of fulfilling love with another.

In the opening scene, Gabriella (Léa Seydoux) is standing in front of a green screen receiving instructions from Bonello. It's the first clue that this film will be unconventional and surprising. Fair warning.

The film takes place at three different times. The story begins in Paris in 1910. Louis (a tremendous George MacKay - "1917") is in the process of wooing Gabrielle away from her attentive but uninteresting husband. There are also scenes in 2014 in Los Angeles. Gabrielle is a housesitting struggling actor/model. Lou is an incel psychopath who stalks her while spouting ominously about seeking "retribution." Finally, again in Paris, action takes place in 2044. In this dystopian future, AI has taken over the world, people must wear airtight masks to go outside and humans are strongly encouraged to engage in "purification," a process of purging DNA of past traumas and permanently deadening emotions. Bonello flashes forward and backward regularly. If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, it's probably because you're accurately processing how this story unfolds. To further complicate matters, Bonello shifts tone and content throughout the film - from period piece (1910) to thriller/horror film (2014) to dystopian sci-fi film (2044).

Bonello uses these three palettes, each shot in a distinctive cinematic style, to throw out some really weighty issues: that our sense of dread may be an accurate foreshadowing of the collapse of civilization, that deadening ourselves emotionally may be the most adaptive way to cope with the atrocities that occur around us continuously. For good measure, he plays with the juxtaposition of loneliness and love and scrutinizes the role of fate. If you crave a straightforward narrative or have low tolerance for ambiguity, now is a good time to run away screaming.

For you brave souls who accept the challenge, you'll be rewarded with a mesmerizing performance by Léa Seydoux, a close-up of hand-holding that's more sensual than most sex scenes plus images and ideas that will haunt you for days after the experience.

This "La bête" is a strange filmic object, a science fiction melodrama between Lynch, Cronemberg and the minimalism of certain French experimental cinematography a la Godard, also touching on liminal oriental aesthetics, between the kitsch of a Sion Siono and the intellectualism of a Tsukamoto or a Park Chan-wook. The result is an exhausting aesthetic requiem, which romantically travels through time to forget it and make it forget (purify it in its DNA), a bit like the Gondry of "Eternal Sunshine..." and "La Science des rêves", but always cold and inexpressive, almost, in the extreme (in)expressive nuances of Léa Seydoux's face and in the icy looks of the substitute George MacKay (the film was written for the late Gaspard Ulliel). Freely inspired by Henry James's 1903 story "The Beast in the Jungle", Bonello's film talks about love and fear as engines of revolutions and annihilation, necessary but mysterious upheavals. Bonello's first attempt at sci-fi themes claims the right to transmute cinematographic language in an attempt to give a new original form to the unspeakable: the operation is halfway successful, in my opinion, because it fascinates aesthetically but is a bit exhausting on a narrative level and form. One remains dumbfounded and tired after the two-hour-plus duration, visual snippets remain in memory a la Oneohtrix Point Never, one would almost think, crazy sensorial splinters from other eras that resonate inexplicably, perhaps evoking the most famous motto of Hildegard of Bingen "Composing unknown characters and making an unknown language resonate." A mysterious and fascinating cinematographic object, undoubtedly, but not of immediate enjoyment or assimilation, but capable of arousing reflections and reasoning after the fact: a film to be investigated, to dig into for satisfaction. For many but not for everyone.