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.
No comments:
Post a Comment