The Beast
Bertrand Bonello’s film, “The Beast” (“La Bete”), is based on Henry James’ 1903 short story called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Some scholars of James see this as a tale in which he looks back with self-reproach on a life of inaction. It deals with John Marcher who tells his friend May Bartram that he dreads an unknown calamity which would destroy everything he has and everyone close to him. She says she knows what he means.
“’You mean you feel how my obsession poor old thing may correspond to some possible reality?’ ‘To some possible reality.’ ‘Then you will watch with me?’”
So she does. And Marcher’s fear changes into passivity towards her for the rest of his days. At the end of the story, mourning a love he never allowed himself to have, he realizes that the disaster was his own dread.
In Bonello’s movie it is around the time of France’s great flood of 1910 that popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier (Lea Seydoux) confesses this fear to Louis (George MacKay), a young man from England with whom she soon begins a relationship whose nature they can’t quite agree on. But it isn’t about being scared to get involved romantically with Louis or not only.
Bonello isn’t saying that we should fear fear itself. He is saying we should be afraid very afraid. What he makes is not just an art movie but one hell of a horror picture, maybe the best since 2010 began. A vision of three (really four) nightmare times; all in this same screwed up world.
What happens to Gabrielle played by Lea Seydoux at perhaps her most superbly controlled and heartbreaking isn’t spiritual or conceptual cataclysm (though yes, at first it is), they are ‘real,’ or Real. They are corporeal/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they can’t be avoided. You cannot stop what’s coming to you, my friend. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm you’re wasting your time. Nor will even a change in reality’s fabric itself and this seems to happen at least half a dozen times in the film keep horror away from you. The beast is not in the jungle; it is in us, and it is barely there for us to breathe when we get to 2044.
Seems happy, right? I mean what can you say? Bonello knows how to thrust us into a heightened sense of the grinding noise of contemporary life like few others, and without being too impartial or too slow about it. I said three timelines but there’s actually four the movie is bookended by a green screen session where Seydoux, maybe as Gabrielle, maybe as herself, is being coached through some exercises for a scene in which she does indeed catch “the beast” and then emits a blood-curdling scream as though she’s just caught “the beast.” The image breaks down into a beautiful abstract mural of pixels. Digitization here is both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of visual glitch and audio glitch.
Then we bounce through three time periods: 1910, 2014, when “Gabby” house sits for her cousin in L.A. and attracts the wrath of Incel Louis (MacKay) Lewansky (30 year old who’s “magnificent” but has never been with a woman), who now prepares to take his revenge; and 2044, when Gabrielle’s character tries to end her cycle of reincarnation torment via DNA purge. Dolls keep coming up old-fashioned ones made for fans of Gabby the concert pianist, an unhelpfully talking doll in the Hollywood house, walking/talking A.I. helper (Guslagie Malanda, as effective here in relatively small role as she was in lead of ’22’s “Saint Omer”). Electrical fire figures into the 1910 sequence; malware attack on laptop is one of many insane blowups during the 2014 scenario.
Bits feel Lynchian too especially in L.A., where Gabrielle is transfixed/repulsed by a TV singing contest show that feels like it might have sprung whole from the mind of “Twin Peaks”’ creator and that the song of love that recurs throughout turns up at the very end, sung in its original version by Roy Orbison. But unlike with Lynch, Bonello’s got a pretty unobscure point to make. Mainly about how the pursuit of authenticity in life is always stymied by obstacles of humanity’s own making (although I guess you could say Twin Peaks season 8 treated this theme relatively unambiguously). “There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tells what is probably the movie’s scariest Louis. Bonello fears more than anything that one day there will arise a horrible order that makes all remaining beauty vanish.
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