At a decisive moment in Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated Past Lives, Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung asks Greta Lee’s Nora a puzzling question: “What if this is a past life as well, and we are already something else to each other in our next life?” Of course, writer-director Celine Song does not mean for this to be taken literally—her use of “past lives,” or in-Yun, is more so an elegant metaphor for change—but the exchange bears a striking resemblance to the core concept behind Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, another, albeit more inscrutable, film about the bond between two lovers distanced across lifetimes and their literal past lives. One of the year’s strangest releases, The Beast is the type of bold and intentionally divisive work destined to be adored by few and hated by many, but there’s a purity to this spiritually transcendent concept of love defying the bounds of logic that makes it difficult to pull away, even when the film dares you to.
A postmodernist blend of Cloud Atlas, Lost Highway and the works of Harmony Korine—the latter of whom is directly referenced via footage from Trash Humpers—Bonello’s (Saint Laurent, Nocturama) film feels like an NFT filtered through an arthouse cinema lens. It’s scattered, terminally online and arrives directly as a product of our current moment. Based loosely on Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, it freely transposes the story’s complicated themes of loneliness and fatalism onto a pseudo-futuristic world obsessed with the notion of obviating the need to feel anything at all. This world it depicts is not too dissimilar from our own, though like James’ novel, it uses dramatic exaggeration in order to highlight a common societal ailment. In the battle against loneliness, we are often our own worst enemies, crafting invisible adversaries in order to justify our hesitance to grow.
Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Color, One Fine Morning) plays Gabrielle, a woman living across three lifetimes. In one, she is a virtuoso pianist entertaining high society at the turn of the century in Paris, just before the Great Flood of 1910. In another, she is a struggling actress housesitting a luxury home in Los Angeles, unaware that she is being stalked by a murderous incel, Louis (George Mackay, also playing several variations of the same person). Finally, we find her in 2044 as a woman pressured to undergo a process in order to survey these past lives, ostensibly to cleanse her DNA from feeling strong emotions termed as “affects.” Though its specific nature is never clarified (it’s hinted to be biological), the world of the future has experienced some sort of natural disaster. Advanced AI has helped shepherd humanity into a new, safer existence, but in turn, expects their human counterparts to conform to a robotic and unfeeling nature. Hesitant, Gabrielle decides to experience the process, finding connections between each of her past experiences that draw her closer to Mackay’s Louis.
It’s difficult to sum up or categorize The Beast, a film that can be alternately romantic, classical or bracingly modern in both form and function. The Paris segments, most akin to James’ novella, possess the air of a prestige costume drama in which Gabrielle is torn between her marriage to a wealthy dollmaker, Georges (Martin Scali) and her growing attraction to Louis. In this reality, Louis is a charismatic loner with whom Gabrielle has shared her secret fear: a “beast,” or some nameless catastrophe, lying in wait to strike and ruin her life, as well as the lives of those around her.
The Los Angeles segment, which shifts in perspective between Gabrielle and Louis, is a grimly ironic and borderline-Lynchian horror movie in which Mackay’s character downgrades significantly from a suave intellectual to an Elliot Rodger-type incel, vlogging about how he “deserves girls” and how he’s going to punish them for not having sex with him. The tonal whiplash is intentionally absurd and heightens the film’s sense of unreality, complimented greatly by Seydoux and Mackay’s fearless commitment to the bit. Even in these vastly different lifetimes, the pair are still inexorably drawn to each other. The past informs the present, and even a romance destined by fate can be thwarted by those afraid to let go of their own anxieties.
Though obviously informed by some sense of purpose, many of Bonello’s choices behind the camera are perplexing. For one, the film is full of editing mistakes. In the story’s latter half, there are intentional frame skips, pauses and repeated actions, all of which throw the form of the film completely off-balance. In a sequence where Gabrielle and her friend Dakota (Dasha Nekrasova) drink beers in a Mustang, it’s egregiously obvious that neither of the actresses are taking actual sips. Is this intentional? Probably. But the reasoning remains illusory. To be fair, The Beast dispenses with any sense of formal reality early on, beginning with Gabrielle acting against a literal green screen. These moments, greatly in contrast to the formal elegance of the Paris segments, often suggest a commentary on filmmaking itself, as well as the nature of faking emotion through performance. It can sometimes feel as if Bonello is simply playing an extended joke on the audience, especially when the film’s end credits are embedded in a QR code, instructing viewers to “scan me.” Audacious? Yes. Annoying? Also, yes.
Whether or not The Beast is a “good” movie in the traditional sense may be entirely subjective. Each of its (many) inspired moments suggest the presence of a strong filmmaker behind the camera, but there’s also a doggedly provocative quality to portions of the film that, much like Korine’s own referenced work, seeks to defy the notion of being cinema at all. The performances are excellent, as is much of the camerawork. There’s a strong sense of atmosphere and dread that pervades Gabrielle’s world even as the story slips into silliness, and even a profound sadness to be found in her and Louis’ self-thwarted courtship. A memorably flawed film is better than a competently mediocre one, and there’s likely few movies this year that will match Bonello’s latest for pure, unrelentingly, inventive absurdity. Give yourself over to The Beast, and you might find something you weren’t expecting.
Photo courtesy Sideshow / Janus Films
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