The film by one of the most prominent contemporary French directors Bertrand Bonello, “The Beast” (La bete), is loosely inspired by the story of American classic Henry James “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903). After watching this movie, annotated as a “romantic anti-utopia,” Mikhail Trofimenkov felt tempted to compare Bonello to a “hen” that pecks at the motifs of outstanding films by other directors, creating an incomprehensible cocktail of them.
It is difficult for the beauty Gabriel (Lea Seydoux) to live in this — or, rather, that — world. The thing is, she has to coexist with herself in three different historical eras.
In 1910, marked by a catastrophic flood in Paris — the raging Seine passed through Rue de Rivoli, rolled up to the Louvre and other Elysian palaces — she is happily married to a doll manufacturer. She plays early Schoenberg pieces on the piano and flirts with cosmopolitan Louis (George MacKay).
In 2014, changing her hairstyle and outfits, she earns a living by taking care of a luxurious mansion in California in the absence of its owners. She tries her hand at modeling, then, so to speak, as an actress, posing on a green chroma key background for dubious videos about the need to follow traffic rules. She swallows even more dubious pills at a retro disco, resembling a celebration of the living dead. And she flirts with the same Leo, in his new guise as a pensive psychopath-virgin, hunting for blondes who resist his charms.
Finally, in 2044, in the era of artificial intelligence supremacy, Gabriel lies in a bathtub with some nauseating black liquid to undergo a “cleansing” or “DNA correction” operation. That is, erasing past emotions, without which in the beautiful and almost deserted new world, human beings have no social prospects.
To her misfortune, she is among the seven-tenths of individuals who resist psychocorrection, no matter how many times they try to insert the “cleansing” needle into her ears. In this guise, Gabriel will also meet Louis, where the movie’s action will cut off. And the bewildered viewer, understanding nothing of their relationship, will only realize that Lea Seydoux can emit beastly screams as no worse than Hollywood stars of yesteryear meeting King Kong.
The heroine’s turbulent journey between eras is not only enriched by her screams. She will die a couple of times, drowning in a fire-ravaged and simultaneously flooded factory of her husband or catching a bullet in a California pool. But she will survive an earthquake in the same California.
Three times, a dove will fly into her dwelling — whether the Holy Spirit, or, as Louis will explain, a harbinger of disaster. She will step on a dead pigeon barefoot on a Californian lawn, but she will meet a tender llama on a Paris street. Three times, a fortune-teller will give her vague and ominous predictions. And other trivialities: a bartender in a mystical cabaret will also turn into a dove. A talking and extremely unpleasant doll will transform into a body-positive afro-American Kelly (Guslagi Malanga).
All this quite schizophrenic and pretentious mosaic could be considered surrealist vision if it weren’t for one “but.” Bertrand Bonello, with exceptional self-confidence, puts on screen not his own visions, but visions that visited other directors long ago.
In the interiors of 1910, worthy of Marcel Proust’s pen, Gabriel and Louis try to understand where they know each other from and where they have met. Was it in Rome or in Naples? Oh, come on, you met “last year in Marienbad.” That was the name of the great hallucinatory film by the “New Wave” luminary Alain Resnais (1961). And there, too, the characters, trapped in the “eternal return” of memories, hopelessly tried to understand who they are, where they come from, and where they are going.
Erasing the feelings and memories of his characters is much more successful and enjoyable for Michel Gondry in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004). The doll motif in Bertrand Bonello’s interpretation is equally unoriginal. There was a great film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991), about two Veroniques, a Frenchwoman and a Pole, whose lives peculiarly reflected each other. And there was a puppeteer character who explained that, just like in any puppet theater, there is always a backup copy of any other puppet in case of breakage, so in life. Like there is a Great Puppeteer who prepared a double for each mortal.
Poor Kieslowski: he only talked about doubles. But Bonello — why bother — puts a whole puppet factory on screen, where celluloid Gabriels are baked in industrial quantities, constructs a world of the future where there may be more dolls than people.
It is even uncomfortable to talk about the genetic link between “The Beast” and David Lynch’s films from “Blue Velvet” (1986) to “Inland Empire” (2006). Bonello snatched everything he could and couldn’t from Lynch, including the interiors of the same club where the bartender, splashing a cocktail from a shaker, flies out the window on pigeon wings. A shameful movie, in short, like petty theft.