La Bête

Dolls are made with neutral expressions to please everyone. Humans, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, may yet take after dolls.

In the future dominated by Artificial Intelligence, Gabrielle is encouraged to purge her character of negative emotions. She can do this by revisiting past lives in France (1904) and Los Angeles (2014), where she exhibited intense reactions. She is warned that at any time she will encounter a beast that intends to do her harm.

As Gabrielle navigates the past she encounters Louis in both places. Gabrielle is simultaneously fearful of Louis and in love with him. He has similar feelings about her. To trust one another Gabrielle and Louis need to bridge generations, cultures, and the depths of their own hearts. Either that or become human dolls.

The Beast is cerebral, intense, complex, and mystifying. While the film is abnormally long, there are scenes that quicken the pulse and make it seem like no time passes at all. The nonlinear plot construction and deep conversations of The Beast make it into a intricate puzzle that I am still trying to figure out. I'd like the film more if it didn't paint American males with such a broad and negative brush (but perhaps I don't like this aspect because it is so uncomfortably true). The film is growing in my appreciation, perhaps as I accept this truth. The Beast is loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James and the character of a real person. I love the thought of revisiting past lives and exploring the question about whether intense emotions do more harm than good.

A cool concept that's lost in the confusing execution. A good score with sleek set pieces but the jarring tonal shifts seem random. Clearly deep messages & themes but I can't get my head around them. Yet Seydoux is mesmerizing as always.

. .

. A cool concept that's lost in the confusing execution. A good score with sleek set pieces but the jarring tonal shifts seem random. Clearly deep messages & themes but I can't get my head around them. Yet Seydoux is mesmerizing as always.

. .

. A cool concept that's lost in the confusing execution. A good score with sleek set pieces but the jarring tonal shifts seem random. Clearly deep messages & themes but I can't get my head around them. Yet Seydoux is mesmerizing as always.

It would be slightly unfair to assert that The Beast is a 20-minute story concept pulled from the rejection pile of Black Mirror plots, but given that it was loosely based on a 1903 novella from Henry James, it could be merely unfair to make such an assertion. We see past lives lived throughout imperfect days, slavishly assembled in three interleaved timelines, sometimes experienced within an alternative reality, while at other times merely through fictional narrative.

If one pays attention for all 145 minutes, and one would assuredly deserve a personalized baby poupée if one were to have the fortitude and stimulants required to achieve such a task, one would likely attain a sense of metaphorical imagery. There are metaphors for art, floods, beasts, pigeons, love songs, or maybe I have it backwards. There could be metaphors for humanity, disaster, and dolls. Either way, The Beast is probably filled with several metaphors for which I missed their significance, except for any references to flooding or fires. Flooding and fires are metaphors for disaster, whether real or impending.

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay act with the necessary talent to put together movies like this, but movies like this remind me how I would appreciate it if restaurants were to offer Half the Food for Half the Price.

I wouldn't mind directors offering Half a Movie for Half the Price.

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.

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.