La Bête

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.

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.

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.

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.