Léa Seydoux and George MacKay star in French auteur Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, sprawling across timelines.
Bertrand Bonello, who first became notable to U.S. audiences with the historical drama House of Pleasure (2011), has increasingly made films that play around in time and space, as he himself has noted. His latest, The Beast, pushes that tendency to extremes.
Léa Seydoux, who previously appeared in a supporting role in the director’s Saint Laurent (2014), stars across three different time periods. She’s introduced as an actress in a Hollywood production in 2014, then as the wife of a successful Paris doll-making businessman in 1904, and finally as a woman contemplating a medical procedure in an AI-dominated 2044.
In all three scenarios, she encounters George MacKay, who’s an angry, so-called incel (involuntary celibate) in 2014, an upper-crust man of no distinguished background in 1904, and a casual acquaintance in 2044.
Inspired by Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, first published in 1903, the film deals with similar themes, in that the lead character becomes consumed by the idea that his life will be defined by a catastrophic event of one kind or another. Bertrand Bonello translates this idea into three different scenarios, each appropriate to the period in which they unroll, conjuring up extended sequences which can be quite involved and ravishing in their beauty.
Judging by his work over the past 15 years or so, Bonello is much more interested in the emotional side of things, with his narratives functioning more as an outline to allow for heightened drama to slowly coalesce. Having that in mind, The Beast becomes more pleasurable to watch and fascinating to contemplate.
True, there is an uneven consistency to the effectiveness of the scenarios that he dreams up. Thus, the Hollywood sequence in 2014, which dominates the latter portion of the film, becomes nearly unwatchable with the arrival of the thoroughly sour incel character; it grinds on and on with little apparent purpose in mind.
That purposelessness also seals the fate of the 2044 sequence, which, again, repeats notions that do not benefit from endless repetition. On the third (?!) hand, the 1904 sequence becomes eloquent and poignant in how it plays out.
Bonello moves back and forth across the timelines, sometimes for an extended period and sometimes just for brief moments, as he has done in all his most recent films. It feels like he’s an artist in search of the perfect color combination. His restless nature makes all his films, including The Beast, worth seeking out and seeing on the biggest screen possible.
The film opens Friday, April 26, at Angelika Film Center in Dallas.
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