The Beast – when a difficult film becomes great on second watch
There can be fewer better experiences in moviegoing than when a frustrating first-watch three-star movie transforms before your very eyes on second watch to become a five-star masterpiece.
That is the experience I had with Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast.
I first saw it last October, only having Peter Bradshaw’s glowing five-star rating from the Venice Film Festival as a guide (I made the tactical decision to actually avoid reading the review in case I wanted a crack at it myself).
But first time around I found the movie ambitious but flawed with some startling imagery and sequences but overall, to dip into cliche, less than the sum of its parts.
But nevertheless I was intrigued by it. A three-star review can mean ‘bang average’ but it can also mean something that flirts with greatness but doesn’t quite reach.
And yet the movie swirled around my mind as I puzzled over exactly what Bonello was trying to accomplish and trying to say with The Beast, which is a lavish, unwieldly, complex movie about loneliness, emotion, love (the fear of it) and the future.
It is human nature to want to understand: to make some sense of what is presented in front of you. And one of my own flaws, as a moviegoer and a person, is a persistent struggle with the abstract. Maybe my emotions and reactions are bad at thinking for themselves when given such latitude.
I generally find abstract movies easier than, say, abstract paintings. A childhood growing up watching them helps a bit, even if, as a teenager, I absolutely whiffed on the message of a movie like Fight Club (I actually bought a t-shirt with one of Tyler Durden’s slogans printed on; the irony wasted on me).
The Beast has no central, overriding message (emotion is important, maybe? Eternal love is dying out?).
It definitely has no easy answers and it’s not even clear what questions it is asking. It also has very little plot and is presented in an illusive, cryptic way, making itself deliberately difficult to get to grips with (exposition? Forget about it.).
It is essentially a love story told across three generations and locations: Paris in 1910, Los Angeles in 2014 and a bland, featureless city in 2044 (possibly also LA).
2044 hosts the film’s framing device. In a future where artificial intelligence has taken over most of the jobs in the world (because humans are unable to control their emotions and therefore “useless”), Lea Seydoux’s Gabrielle is pressured to undergo a procedure to ‘wipe’ her DNA of its history and thereby cleanse herself of emotion.
In doing so she travels back in time, both to 1910 and 2014, to see her previous lives where she repeatedly crosses paths with George Mackay’s Louis — and inevitably does so in 2044 too.
In Paris in 1910 Gabrielle is a dollmaker who endures an irrational fear of a terrible, unknown event in her future, obliterating her. This is the ‘beast’ of the film’s title (it is loosely adapted from Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle) and this deep-seated inexorable paranoia fuels a loneliness in Gabrielle that appears to drive her toward Louis across several generations. When she’s a struggling house-sitting actress in 2014 and in 2044 as her brain fights back against the de-emotioning procedure.
But, as with all Great films, The Beast is more than its plot, so much more. Bonello delights in red herrings, blind alleys and unexplained deviations (at some parts of The Beast Bonello even destroys the film itself, an apparent act of self-sabotage).
But then The Beast is not meant to be completely understood. It is not explained what the root cause of Gabrielle’s overwhelming internal fear is (although the devastating ending does offer some food for thought).
It might be a parable for humanity’s fear of growing irrelevance in an increasingly automated and emotionless world, it might be the inherent fear of being alone. It might be something else entirely.
Across The Beast’s 145-minute runtime Bonello digs into the looming ubiquity of AI, the horror (and sadness) of incel culture and the importance of emotion (and music!) while also serving up a lacerating satire of modernity and the direction society is heading.
Or maybe, it’s none of that.
Further reading:
For your interest, here’s the first (abandoned)draft of that three-star review I attempted to write back in October, which I have only edited to fix typos and spelling errors:
Fundamentally a love story, The Beast is a time-hopping two-and-a-half-hour exercise in cryptic symbolism, startling imagery and inscrutable dialogue that unfortunately misses more than it hits.
Bertrand Bonello’s latest is loosely adapted from Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, albeit with the main role gender-switched.
But The Beast, driven by a shape-shifting and magnetic central performance from Lea Seydoux, who is arguably the finest working actor in arthouse cinema, asks too much of the audience and gives too little in return.
Three narratives, one in 1910, one in 2014 and one in 2044 are spliced together to tell a fractured romance (of sorts), laced with some thin contemporary social critiques and observations.
Framed around 2044, Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing several tests to rid her of her emotion, without success, when she meets George Mackay’s Louis and feels like she knows him.
The film then cuts between 1910, where Seydoux runs a doll-making operation in Paris during the Great Flood, 2014, where she is an aspiring actress in a world of cosmetic surgery and green screen and 2044, where she clings to her own empathy and tries to examine her memories of the past in nostalgic nightclubs that call back to the late 20th century.
In The Beast, Bonello paints a very bleak future of the path humanity is on.
In all of the timelines Gabrielle crosses paths with Louis (Hammersmith-born Mackay learned French for the role), but in their relationships are different, impacted by changing societal forces, be they the perils of the aristocracy in the early 20th century, the incel-infused terror of the 2010s or the emotionless and bland future that Bonello predicts.
The film earned some sporadic rave reviews coming out of the Venice Film Festival and been compared the Tom Hanks’ own time-travelling love epic Cloud Atlas (though The Beast is far more ambitious and unwieldy).
Some of the time jumps are incorporated naturally into the narrative, others are scattershot. One, about an hour into the film, is liable to give the audience whiplash.
The decision to open the film in 2014 where Seydoux’s character is struggling as an actress in an emotionless world surrounded by green screen does pay off with aplomb.
But some other narrative choices just seem designed to deliberately confuse the audience.
It is a frustrating watch because some of the terror and fear felt by Seydoux’s Gabrielle is transmitted expertly.
The recurring motifs of fortune tellers, a pigeon being the sign of imminent doom and the through line of dolls between 1910, 2014 and 2044 is also an interesting concept that just leaves too much to the audience.
Toward the end the film tries to deconstruct itself, telling the audience not to trust their own eyes in the same way Gabrielle cannot trust hers.
It’s an impressive central performances by Seydoux, and without it The Beast would be in severe danger of falling apart entirely, disappearing under the weight of its own self-importance.
Mackay also excels, especially in the 2014 sequence where he has to perform some of the vile incel language (cribbed verbatim) of mass murderer Elliot Rodger. But his chemistry with Seydoux falls flat, although knowing Bonello that might be a deliberate choice.
Ultimately The Beast feels like less than the sum of its parts, pacing issues plague an ambitious but too often inert look at society and the future.
