Seydoux anchors a masterful movie

 

  Cinema tells the truth. Cinema also lies. Nearly everything we see on a screen can be viewed as a form of deception. Cinema is the art that teases us into thinking seeing is believing. At its best, cinema demands second thoughts.

  Director Bertrand Bonello knows this — or least I think he does. Bonello begins The Beast, which takes place during the course of several time periods, by showing actress Lea Seydoux taking directions in front of a green screen. 

  One of the best actresses working today, Seydoux is supposed to show fear. A monster lurks. Her eyes and her body react to the unseen menace, but, then, aren't all the worst monsters invisible?

  Immediately, we know we're watching a movie, that we're about to enter an illusory world in which even fear can become a performative act. 

  Bonello has made a version of a time travel movie that doesn't treat time travel as a self-consciously employed conceit. The movie takes place in the present, in the past and in the future. It takes place in Paris and Los Angeles. It pushes against constraints.

  Bonello manages all this by focusing on Seydoux's Gabrielle who, in 2044, lives in a society that wants her to purge herself, to purify her DNA so that she finally can abandon her doom-struck propensities. By becoming a blank slate, she'll find happiness and success.

  Gabrielle reluctantly agrees and immerses herself in a  tank where she floats while listening to intermittent instructions. The movie floats along with her. Bornello never totally clarifies what's happening; he threads the movie's central conceit throughout, offering hints more than explanations.

  Bonello bases the movie on a 1903 story by Henry James. The Beast in the Jungle tells the story of a man immobilized by the fear that something catastrophic will happen, something "prodigious and terrible."

 

Gabrielle shares this crippling anxiety, most keenly expressed in early 20th century sequences in which she meets Louis (George McKay) at a party. 

   In this incarnation, she's married to a successful business man who runs a doll factory. She's also an accomplished pianist who's struggling to master the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

  McKay's Louis reappears in each of the film's episodes in different guises but he’s always around to remind us that this relationship with Gabrielle -- passionately yearned for by each of them -- resists consummation. 

  Bonello uses the Great Flood of Paris in 1910 to create an eerie coda to the episode. Louis visits the toy factory. Gabrielle's husband leads a minimal tour, but Louis and Gabrielle are stranded when the factory floods and the electrical system shorts. Fire breaks out.

  Bonello includes a haunting underwater sequence in which bodies turn into a kind of doomed floating poetry. It's a great bit of filmmaking -- tense, horrifying and beautiful.

  There are other kinds of death at work here, not the least of them, the elimination of the human personality in a world of AI and androids, a world that attempts to manipulate people for their own good. 

  During the future segment, Gabrielle meets an amazingly empathic woman who calls herself a "doll" (Guslagie Malanda). The "doll," probably an extremely life-like android, will do anything to provide Gabrielle with  happiness.

  When the movie shifts to Los Angeles, Gabrielle has become an aspiring actress who's working as a model. She's house sitting in a sleek modern home where she's isolated.

   In this variation on Bonello's theme, Louis has become an enraged, self-justifying incel who believes he has earned the right to kill women. He makes Gabrielle his target.

    Tense and bordering on horror, this section of the film introduces Gabrielle to Dakota (Dasha Nekrasova), a model who suggests that Gabrielle consider body-altering plastic surgery, another refusal to accept bodily limitations.

    Bonello moves toward a bitter finale that doesn't quite resound the way we expect, but gets the job done. 

     The Beast employs lots of moving parts and I'm not sure all of them are joined with finesse. No matter. Bonello  exploits, teases, and explores the beautiful fluidity of cinema and Seydoux provides him with the center -- wavering, malleable, erotic, and conflicted -- the film needs. 

      In a way, The Beast is an acute analysis of cinematic possibility and the ongoing battle to retain some measure of humanity -- for Gabrielle, maybe for all of us.

  

Bob's Cinema Diary: Jan. 12, 2023: 'No Bears' and 'Saint Omer'

No Bears

 In 2010, Iranian director Jafar Panahi was prohibited by his government from making films. Despite the ban, Panahi was able to make five films. Last July, Panahi was jailed for six years. Even he has been unable to make films while incarcerated. Prior to his imprisonment, Panahi made No Bears, a film that, among other things, deals with difficulties of filming when a director must operate surreptitiously. In No Bears, which sometimes resembles a documentary, Panahi (This is Not A Film, Taxi) plays a director who has moved to a village away from Teheran. He uses his laptop and phone to stay in touch with a crew that's filming a story about two people who are trying to leave the country. In the film-within-a-film, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei) aren't in agreement. She has obtained a fake passport; he has not. She refuses to leave without him. For his part, Panahi runs into trouble with the townspeople of Jabbar, a small village near the Turkish border. Panahi's solicitous landlord (Vahid Mobaseri) apprises him of problems he may have with the locals who are upset about a supposedly compromising photograph they believe he has has taken. Both narrative streams of Panahi's film lead to tragic results. Employing a no-frills style, Panahi has made a complex, thought-provoking film that raises questions about a filmmaker’s responsibilities and makes you wonder about a society that would put such a gifted artist in jail.*

Saint Omer

First off, it's necessary to know that Saint-Omer is a small town in France that was home to a trial that gripped the French imagination. A French woman of Senegalese descent confessed to the murder of her toddler. She left her child sleeping on a beach so that death would follow when the tide rolled in. The woman claimed the devil -- or more accurately -- demons made her do it. That crime becomes the basis for director Alice Diop's Saint Omer, a meticulous depiction of the the mother’s trail as seen through the eyes of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a Senegalese-French writer and professor. Rama, who's pregnant, convinces her publisher that she should write about the trial. She sees a connection between the defendant and Medea. Much of the movie involves the testimony of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), the self-confessed murderer. An aspiring student of philosophy, Laurence cuts a peculiar figure; she says she hopes the trial will provide an explanation for what she did. Rama's fascination with Laurence gives the movie the provocative charge of a writer trying to tackle a disturbing but irresistible subject. No, Rama decides this isn't some modern version of Medea. Diop allows the racism that Laurence faces to emerge as the trial unfolds. The resultant movie peers into both Senegalese and French cultures, focusing on issues of race, motherhood and alienation. But Diop doesn't stop there: She confronts us with the inexplicable side of human behavior which she explores in lengthy, immobile shots that resist the sensationalism a subject such as this might have elicited. Perhaps Diop wanted to move slowly so that we could ponder how ill-equipped we are to deal with secrets the heart insists on keeping — even from the person in which it beats.

*On Feb. 3 news broke that Panahi was released from prison. Panama's release came two days after he had begun a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. Let's hope that Panahi remains free.