There’s a compelling watchableness about all Bertrand Bonello’s films, notwithstanding the not infrequent case that some elements work brilliantly and others seem somehow misjudged, as if all the strands he’s brought together succeed on their own but don’t always mesh in a meaningful way. That was the case with Zombi Child and it’s also true of The Beast, a film set in three time periods of which only two mutually resonate.
Very loosely based on Henry James’ late novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which a man’s inability to open himself to love is the cause for his lifelong premonition of catastrophe, Bonello’s Beast turns the questioning figure into a woman, played to perfection by Léa Seydoux, and weaves together three incarnations, from 1910, 2014 and 2044. Cerebral and striking in all periods, the film works on richly meaningful levels in the first and third periods but loses its universality with the 2014 story, when the man is made into an incel. While intriguing on its own, the plot twist removes a deeper message about humanity in general, which the editing itself seems to acknowledge by largely relegating this section to the end of the film.
Before then, Bonello entwines the earlier past and future in ways that force us to question the importance of sentiment and emotional pain in our psychological makeup, arguing that our humanity is intrinsically tied to exposing ourselves to the full range of feelings: we can’t truly love if we seek to file off all the spikey edges of our psyches. Venturing into science fiction territory for the first time, the director makes AI his immediate target, with its enticing promise of easier lives for all that leads to benumbed placidity. This section’s predictive urgency becomes a natural outgrowth of Henry James’ potent treatment of a man’s refusal to unlock his emotions until it’s too late: this way lies disaster.
A brief green screen prologue in which LA-based actress Gabrielle Monnier (Seydoux) rehearses a role quickly moves to 1910, when she’s seen gliding through an elegant Parisian reception looking for her husband Georges (Martin Scali), the owner of a doll-making factory. The 1910 scenes were shot on 35mm and they’re resplendent with film’s rich, living tonalities, captured in the stately sweep of Josée Deshaies’ waltzing camera. Gabrielle’s muted gold Fortuny gown, set off with a Renée Lalique pendant, is complimented by Paul Poiret himself following a viewing of paintings based on Egon Schiele. At the reception she meets Louis (George MacKay), who reminds her, in words largely lifted from the James story, that they met several years earlier. Gabrielle corrects his memory, which got all the details wrong, and then he asks, in a gender reversal of the source material, if she’s still troubled by the great secret she revealed that first time they met.
For the first two-thirds or so of The Beast, the 1910 sequences are partnered with those set in 2044, in a neutral-toned, minimalist Paris shot with a cool, fixed lens. In 1910 Gabrielle was a pianist working on Schönberg, but in the future she checks data plate templates (whatever that is) and wants something more fulfilling. Any job change has to go through AI, whose voice (Xavier Dolan) in the interview warns that her anger and emotional unpredictability exclude her from most “useful” work. The solution is to have her DNA cleansed in a painless process that smooths away any potentially volatile feelings from this life and previous ones; as an online friend who’s been through the process tells her, it’s not that she doesn’t have emotions anymore, but they no longer make her suffer.
In AI-ruled 2044, placidity is the key to a happy life: Gabrielle eventually agrees to the procedure but it’s not working, and she’s assigned an AI nurse, Kelly (Guslagie Malanda, Saint Omer), to help her through the process. But in this world of damped-down emotions, the only place where Gabrielle feels relaxed is in a club that changes theme according to a year (1972, 1980), where she meets Louis who’s also struggling with whether to undergo the cleansing. The Louis of 1910 is the one urging Gabrielle to be honest with herself and acknowledge her feelings, whereas in 2044 he’s uncertain whether to let go and take the easy path. In 2014, when Gabrielle is an aspiring actress house-sitting in LA for a wealthy family, Louis instead is an incel posting videos ranting against women.
This is where The Beast makes a misstep: in the other incarnations, the issue of love, with all its wonder as well as vulnerability, has a universal resonance, whereas for most people incels are a small, disturbed aberration too psychologically damaged to add anything to the discussion. This Gabrielle is lonely and searches for a connection, more willing to admit to her need for companionship than her previous self, yet pairing her with this Louis turns her into a vulnerable woman potentially at the mercy of a crazy man, which has no echo in the other stories. Bonello’s target, his most frightening beast, is AI, much as Henry James’ beast was the kind of self-control that denies us the ability to love. The Beast does a fascinating job connecting these two across 134 years, but the 2014 portion feels like a film needing to play out on its own.
Pairing Seydoux and Mackay works marvelously, their qualities unexpectedly dovetailing, with each at home in French and English but also in negotiating the different kinds of speech, from the playful artifice of 1910 to the straightforward talk of 2014 and then on to a kind of futuristic flatness in 2044. Each brings a hesitant sexual presence that generates the right level of tension, although the film is very much Seydoux’s in that she’s often the sole figure in the frame.
Josée Deshaies’s gorgeous cinematography adapts itself to each time period, but like the film itself revels in the warmth of the 1910 scenes, clear even in the architecture, quietly decorative to match the decorative costumes with their purples, corals and blues. There’s a standout sequence in the doll factory following the historic 1910 Paris flood, exquisitely shot and a fitting climax to this period, when a seemingly small technological advance winds up destroying everything. Bonello’s musical choices (not to mention his own compositions with Anna Bonello) are as ever spot on, with Roy Orbison’s plangent “Evergreen” a fitting accompaniment to a film that seeks to valorize wearing our hearts on our sleeves. As if anticipating cinema’s future, an onscreen QR code appears at the end as the only way to access the final credit roll as well as a brief additional scene.
Director: Bertrand Bonello
Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, loosely based on the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle
Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Élina
Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Julia Faure, Kester Lovelace, Félicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte, Pierre-François Garel, Céline Carrère, Lukas Ionesco, Hortense Gélinet, Pauline Jacquard, Alice Barnole
Producers: Justin Taurand, Bertrand Bonello
Co-producers: Nancy Grant, Xavier Dolan
Cinematography: Josée Deshaies
Production designer: Katia Wyszkop
Costume designer: Pauline Jacquard
Editing: Anita Roth
Music: Bertrand Bonello, Anna Bonello
Sound: Nicolas Cantin, Clément Laforce, Jean-Pierre Laforce
Production companies: Les Films du Bélier (France), My New Picture (France), Sons of Manual (Canada), Ami Paris (France), Jamal Zeinal-Zade, Arte France Cinéma (France)
World sales: Kinology
Venue: Venice (Competition); Toronto (Special Presentation); New York; London
In French, English
146 minutes
