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.

When David Ehrlich reviewed The Beast (org. French title La Bête), he made the case -- that the movie makes the case -- that we ought to demand every major arthouse director make "their own Cloud Atlas" before joining the choir invisible. That is a fair way to view Bertrand Bonello's recent opus - a languid sci-fi drama that, as far as I'm concerned, solidified the movie year of 2024 as worthy of '23. When seeking out strange and defiant new cinema, this is exactly the kind of mystifying journey on which I yearn to be taken.

In the film, we follow Lea Seydoux through what appears to be different time periods. In several of them, the construction of dolls is involved. In the past and present storylines, she encounters a man played by George MacKay; in the future, she seems to dream of all these moments while submerged in a dark substance. Are they real events on any level? Hey, don't look at me.

It is the sort of film that might easily turn some people off and seem inaccessible as I describe it. (Others have likened its atmosphere and dream logic to the works of Lynch and its unsettling view of love and sexuality to the works of Cronenberg.) But I assure you that the film as such is often quite funny, with MacKay portraying one of the most wince-inducingly accurate parodies of the Incel archetype we've ever seen on film -- his pathetic "I deserve girls" vlog is one of the highlights of the picture, although its similarities with the infamous Elliot Rodger rant will doubtless disturb some viewers.

If that's not doing it for you (understandable), the film also offers beautiful shot compositions, masterly lighting, and wicked satire of modern movie-making itself, chiefly the digitalization of it.

Also, I guess in one of the time periods or "realities" or whatever, Seydoux's character is an actress whose credits seem to include Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. As it happens, we'll be talking more about Korine later -- along with a markedly less intelligent contemplation on modern/future cinema.

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.

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.