Last updated on September 4, 2023
A film by Bertrand Bonello
With: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Kester Lovelace, Julia Faure, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Félicien Pinot
In the near future emotions have become a threat. Gabrielle decides to purify her DNA in a machine that will immerse her in her past lives and rid her of any strong feelings. But then she meets Louis, and although he seems dangerous, she feels a powerful connection to him as if she has known him forever.
Our Review: *
Bonello disappoints as rarely. Admittedly, the beast does not lack ambition, either in content or form. Certainly, we recognize Bonello‘s touch, and we’re not deceived by a few figures, whether it’s this questioning of the links between very distant eras (bringing the past to the present), this almost fetishistic fascination with mannequins, dolls, fashion and what they reflect of man, the fusion of different cinematic genres and the borrowing from accepted references, the importance of the artistic and literary gesture, the primacy of music and atmosphere, the total aesthetic search for a form born of a careful, well thought-out and controlled assembly. We were curious to see what Bonello would make of this short story, which has already inspired Patrick Chiha (The Beast in the Jungle), and which has produced a singular, hypnotic proposition, in that it manages to transfer a story from the Victorian era to the present day, while retaining the quality of observing the passage of time, fashions, appearances and dances as they change, without the underlying aspiration to vitality, as expressed by young people seeking, seducing and escaping from an imperfect reality. We thought that the director of L’apollonide, Souvenirs de la maison close, would be able to reconcile this almost Proustian material, with its fantastic, mysterious touch, evoking myths and philosophical reflections on the evanescent nature of time, youth and beauty, and take the hypnotic effect a step further, bringing in his own share of mystique. Clearly, this was the artistic intention, but Bertrand Bonello‘s desire to venture into cinematic territory that is not his own, and which he probably adores, has led him into a corner. Bonello is no Resnais, he may have said to himself. In any case, he’s clearly not Nolan, Glazer or even Lynch, to whom The Beast sent us back, without subtlety. The pared-down opening, so close to that of Under The Skin (itself not so far from that of Barbarella, with a bit of sagacity), Léa Seydoux, rather lost as a French ersatz of Scarlett Johanson, the interrogations on the possibility of parallel worlds communicating with one another, either technologically (Nolan), or through a form of unconsciousness, an indeterminate mystical force (Lynch), none of this convinces us taken separately, the copy rendered not being worth the original at all. Worse still, by spreading itself too thinly, by constantly baffling itself without a clear aesthetic direction, both the film and its subject lose their coherence and force, especially when the science fiction inserts and societal reflections on artificial intelligence seem to come straight out of a caged brain, confined and inspired mainly by government anti-covid measures, right down to the QR code credits. Admittedly, we share with him this vision of the sad evolution that new technologies seem to promise us and their first effects on social behavior, but what the hell does that have to do with an adaptation of a text by Henri James?
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