About halfway through Bertrand Bonello’s insanely knotty new picture – a Spaghetti Junction of semi-discrete timelines – one version of Léa Seydoux gives in to frustration. “What the f**k are you talking about!” she yells into the ether. What indeed?
Reading reviews of the film at the Venice Film Festival last year, one noted that few could agree where even to start their synopsis. Some favoured the chronological and placed the protagonist, then a concert pianist named Gabrielle, in a lavishly recreated Paris of 1910. Surely it makes more sense to begin with what passes for a framing sequence? Seydoux, maybe playing herself, is directed on green screen as her “character” anticipates the arrival of a malevolent force. If we may lower the intellectual pitch, it’s a little as if we are clicking from the supposed reality in the video game Assassin’s Creed to the recreated past that there constitutes gameplay.
Apologies for getting to PlayStation culture before Henry James, but that is what The Beast will do to you. Bonello, director of uneven art films such as House of Tolerance and Saint Laurent, here draws inspiration from James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. The story concerned a man who defines his life by fear of an obscure ever-looming catastrophe. Only the most inhumanly secure individual will fail to connect a little with that premise. Gabrielle certainly gets it.
In 1910 the menace takes on the form of famous floods that temporarily made a Venice of the French capital. Later she encounters techno-threats and a very modern form of male wickedness. But the film is as much about the awful things that don’t happen to a person. The ghost that’s not really under the bed. The mysterious clanking that isn’t a burglar forcing the gate. The beast that is universal anxiety.
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Bonello is going for the cerebral science-fiction of Alain Resnais’s 1968 time-bender Je t’aime, Je t’aime, but there is also a bit of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas here. We don’t cover quite such a huge time frame. There is nothing like so many characters. But Seydoux’s flit through the eras plays on similar energies.
How to explain what’s going on? We haven’t yet mentioned 2044. In that year, Gabrielle engages with a process that, by way of biological purification, allows her to revisit past lives. The first is that early 20th-century adventure in which Gabrielle, who runs a doll factory on the side, falls for a young man named Louis (an impressively bilingual George MacKay in all the character’s incarnations). In 2044 she visits a club that plays music from the 1980s – Visage’s Fade to Grey, anyone? – where she runs into an altered variation on Louis. In 2014, now an actor, Gabriel meets the most malign Louis. In a slightly clunky bit of social satire, he is now a potentially violent incel who speaks in the language of YouTube neuroses.
As you can tell, any effort to give an impression of the narrative is doomed to failure. The film attempts to herd a clatter of ideas that aren’t always happy to be so disciplined. Some sections – the 1910 episode in particular – have a completeness that justifies our indulgence. In contrast, the incel diversion is too broadly drawn for a film that is not shy in displaying its intellectual ambitions.
What holds it all together is the director’s consistently coy visual aesthetic and a characteristically captivating turn from Léa Seydoux. No other current actor uses shyness as an asset in this manner. Her reticence in allowing feelings full expression brings greater power to a juddering catharsis in the closing frames. The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.
