{"id":16482,"date":"2024-06-15T20:00:53","date_gmt":"2024-06-16T00:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16482"},"modified":"2024-06-15T17:09:06","modified_gmt":"2024-06-15T21:09:06","slug":"the-beast-2023-bertrand-bonello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16482","title":{"rendered":"The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma<\/em>, huh?<\/p>\n

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917<\/em>, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone<\/a><\/em>) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin<\/a><\/em> room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return<\/em> screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow<\/a><\/em>-caliber Trash Humpers<\/a><\/em> popup ads on her laptop).<\/p>\n

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Brendan Boyle<\/a> found different Twin Peaks<\/em> connections:<\/p>\n

In the film\u2019s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello\u2019s shortcomings \u2014 shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle\u2019s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama<\/a><\/em>\u2019s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch\u2019s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities \u2014 a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelg\u00e4ngers of Kyle MacLachlan\u2019s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return<\/a><\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Michael Sicinski<\/a> helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014\/2044).<\/p>\n

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors<\/a><\/em>, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
\n…
\nConsidering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2643,455,1676,837,30,2111,3270,2013,2326],"class_list":["post-16482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2020s","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bertrand-bonello","tag-future","tag-identity","tag-lea-seydoux","tag-past-lives","tag-stalker","tag-time-loop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16537,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16482\/revisions\/16537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}