The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
She was there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years, and she remembered him very much as she was remembered—only a good deal better.
So says John Marcher of May Bartram in Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903). Everything coalesces for John and May to reconnect on an October afternoon, having met years prior. Their meeting again is “the sequel of something of which he had lost at the beginning.” What follows is a strained dalliance, never physically realized. John is transfixed by May’s knowledge of his “secret,” the feeling of an imminent doom that has tailed him his entire life. Something awaits him, like a beast in the jungle. And May—only May, whose illness brings her closer and closer to her own death—knows what it is.
Curiously, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is one of two adaptations of the James novella that premiered in 2023, the other being Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle, which showed at last year’s Berlinale. Bonello’s film, which he has characterized as a “melodrama,” is his most ambitious yet. The supra-genre film is tripartite in story and form; its three interwoven narrative timelines are sheathed in discrete aesthetics, owing much to the dexterity of cinematographer Josée Deshaies, a longtime Bonello collaborator. The world of 2044 is slick, glossy, moody in color and disaffected in feeling; the world of 2014 Los Angeles is heightened, askew, a stylish thriller; the world of 1917 Paris is an ornate period piece. Henry James’s John and May become Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), two citizens of the society of 2044 who have been deemed aberrant by their AI-governed world: their capacity for feeling is too unwieldy for them to be considered productive workers. Gabrielle meets Louis during a process called “purification,” in which they revisit their past lives in order to cleanse themselves of formative traumas. As the plot of The Beast flits through time, Gabrielle and Louis remain at the core, finding each other in every life.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
Bonello’s films are largely experiments in style. They often sweat with languor, addressing their viewer coolly and dispassionately, in spite of extravagant costume and set design. His sensibility is self-reflexive, often referencing—even if it requires anachronism—totems of contemporary fashion and consumerism: In House of Tolerance (2011), a nineteenth-century prostitute says she’s wearing the modern fragrance Jicky by Guerlain; in Nocturama (2016), the youth find refuge in a department store, lounging in luxury linen bed sheets while plotting their future amid aisles of Issey Miyake clothes and Chanel perfumes. Bonello had been a musician before turning to filmmaking, and continues to score his own films. In the same way that one might compose a song, Bonello crafts his films by abiding to the intuition of feeling, often resulting in films that are strange, dryly humorous, and bold. His films are sensual, ambitious audiovisual concepts; they are tricky to parse through words alone.
But Bonello’s films are also ambitious in their willingness to wrestle with elemental ideas. They are porous, freely inspired by literary, historical, and contemporary contexts. On War (2008) arose from theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s eponymous nineteenth-century treatise; Tiresia (2003) was loosely modeled on the Greek myth of Tiresias; in Saint Laurent (2014), a semi-fictionalized Yves Saint Laurent and his lover speak of Ulrike Meinhof’s death and read Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Rose poussière. Bonello’s films often engage in the dialogue of contemporary strife, imaginatively refracting and responding to the quandaries of modern society. In that sense, Bonello is a political filmmaker, attendant to society at large and eager for his films to say something about it. Bonello has lately been concerned with futurity, how younger generations will respond to the world in crisis that they’ve inherited. Nocturama follows a group of young people as they plant bombs across Paris, minds and eyes set toward revolution. Then there is Coma (2022)—directly addressed to Bonello’s own daughter—which follows a young girl navigating isolation and the internet during a global health disaster like COVID-19. Coma feels like a preliminary sketch of The Beast, hyper-stylishly referential to the contemporary world and invested in the same anxieties: that modern, capitalist society has compromised our ability to determine our own lives and fulfillment as human beings; that we are becoming increasingly lonely and alienated from one another; that we are fearful of our own capacity to feel.
Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2022).
These themes of isolation, individual destiny, and connection trickle into The Beast, which most resembles Coma during the timeline in 2014, the second and final life that Gabrielle in 2044 revisits in her purification process. An ominous fate in 2014 is alluded to in Gabrielle's other lives; even the clairvoyant in Paris speaks of the tragedy soon to come upon her. In this past life, Gabrielle is a struggling actress in Los Angeles. She, like the teenage girl in Coma, is alone. She unsuccessfully auditions for modeling jobs; she does drugs in a nightclub, seeking to feel something, and goes home to the disquieting mansion that she housesits. The girl in Coma sinks herself into online fantasies of romance and ever-elusive meaning. So, too, does Gabrielle, who browses her laptop, only to be inundated by advertisements for plastic surgeons, online psychics, and an inflatable parade float of Donald Trump. A sudden earthquake causes Gabrielle to run from her mansion and down the street, bumping into Louis—who, in this timeline, has assumed a far nastier form than Gabrielle’s actress—in tears. Gabrielle begs him to come home with her, telling him that she can’t be alone; Louis declines, responding that he’s too “afraid” that he’d do something stupid. Dejected, Gabrielle leaves; Louis does not. She soon learns that he has been obsessively stalking her.
This timeline in 2014 opens with iPhone videos of Louis Lewanski, as he’s known in this chapter, filmed as he stands in front of his car. “Truly a beautiful day,” he remarks to the camera. “But, as I’ve always said, a beautiful environment can be the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone.” Louis is a college student in Santa Barbara who prides himself on his supposedly indisputable eligibility. He has a “nice” car, “nicer than 90 percent of the people at my college.” He puts “a lot of effort into dressing nice”; his Giorgio Armani glasses were $300, and he’ll even put them on for you so you can see how “fabulous” he looks. Louis sees himself as “the ultimate gentleman.” But, he adds, he’s thirty years old and has never had a girlfriend. He’s never slept with a girl, kissed a girl, held a girl’s hand. “Hell, I don’t even have a girl’s number in my cell phone,” Louis tells us, waxing on about the “injustice” of it all—only because he is so “magnificent,” of course. “When you’re a kid, you don’t have to worry about being attractive or how many girls like you,” Louis says, watching children play at the beach. “When you hit puberty, your life either becomes heaven on earth or living hell. My life became a living hell. No girls liked me. And I hate them all for it.”
While The Beast has shades of Cronenbergian and Romerian horror, some real, lived horror leaps through the video scenes of Louis Lewanski. History points us toward someone else who had believed himself “magnificent,” believed his life to be a “living hell,” and ultimately blamed women: Elliot Rodger, who went on a homicidal rampage against women in 2014, killing six people and injuring fourteen before killing himself, leaving behind an autobiographical manifesto titled “My Twisted World.” The reenactment of Elliot Rodger in The Beast is eerily faithful, hardly deviating from Rodger's own videos, set inside and outside his car, in which he speaks to the phone camera directly. Bonello culled Louis's lines directly from Rodger's videos and manifesto. “I didn’t write these dialogues,” Bonello said of The Beast’s reenactment of Rodger after the film’s premiere at the 2023 New York Film Festival, remarking upon the extremity of their tone. “I wouldn’t be able to write myself these dialogues.”
Bonello’s choice to include Rodger’s lines, stark and unaltered, affords more gravity to this reenactment. One wonders, then, what story Bonello hopes to express through Rodger, a symbol of the violence and annihilation that accompanies misogyny. What knowledge of monstrosity, of will, and of love—and fear—do we gain from resurrecting this particular murderer?
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
Bonello has shown that he understands that cinema is a powerful mode of historical reconfiguration. Hardly one to subscribe to the rigidity of time, Bonello begins Saint Laurent in 1968, a turning point in French political memory, rather than a milestone in the designer's own career. In a moment when Saint Laurent breaks from the shackles of realism, two women stand in an alley, as if to be photographed, and declare themselves to be Yves Saint Laurent. One woman is naked; the other, dressed like the designer; either could be models, or mannequins. They declare in unison, “Yves isn’t here anymore.” They speak for Saint Laurent so as to depict the supplantation of the designer's personal identity by his commercial image and fame. Bonello’s film is not so much about the life of Yves Saint Laurent as it is about the crisis of genius, a man too talented for his own sanity.
This moment in Saint Laurent reveals something crucial about Bonello's orientation toward characterization. Characters in Bonello's films are often spoken for by others; even more often, they wrestle against their inability to control their own fates. Bonello is frequently drawn to dolls, zombies, mannequins, and ghosts, like that of Elliot Rodger. He is interested in those seemingly without agency: a singular genius who is swallowed by public consumption (Saint Laurent), sex workers resentful of their exploitation (House of Tolerance), youth seeking revolution and failing against the state (Nocturama), an isolated girl in a global health crisis (Coma), and men and women who are too repressed, or too afraid, to be in love (The Beast). Bonello enjoys allowing his characters to move between earnestness and chilling opacity. In their past life in Paris, Louis asks Gabrielle to emote like the dolls her husband makes, which have only one expression, “fairly neutral, not too emotional, so that it will please everyone.” Gabrielle offers an expression, utterly inscrutable. The camera lingers, somewhat, and Gabrielle holds still. The experience is uncomfortable; we are asked to witness a woman as a doll.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
Like dolls, images can be vacant, without agency. Bonello's films, including The Beast, are at their core entranced by the function of cinematic images, which can be persuasive and intoxicating in spite of their emptiness. In House of Tolerance, the scenery of the Parisian bordello is sultry and hypnotic, and the women are attired—in gowns, heels, and stockings even when being probed by the doctor—such that the viewer is reminded of how easily beautiful surfaces can enchant. But the beautiful image here has a self-reflexive purpose. Bonello throws the violence done to these nineteenth-century women back upon their contemporary spectators, who repeat their clients’ sin of objectification.
As a self-reflexive critique of the commodification of women, this kind of image—disaffected, vacant—works. As a self-reflexive critique of the commodification of art in Saint Laurent, this image works. But what then of The Beast, which is interested in the emotions? MacKay has said that what he had sought in his performance of Rodger was a “thinness.” So this reenactment, thin and uncanny and sterile, proceeds, with Louis-as-Rodger continuing to stalk Gabrielle all the way to her mansion. The two fall into climactic confrontation, punctuated by the image of a shadow of the beast on the wall, separated by a locked door and fear—for Gabrielle, fear of death, and for Louis, the supposed fear of love. Finally, The Beast commits itself to the facsimile of Elliot Rodger, slaughter and all.
Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2022).
Elisabeth Subrin’s 2022 short, Maria Schneider, 1983, also explores the power of reenactment. The film faithfully restages a television interview that Maria Schneider—who had by then already starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975)—gave in 1983, in which Schneider is asked to discuss a film that she had starred in, and had long since disavowed. Schneider had been nineteen when she was made to engage in a sexual act without her consent, filmed and concretized in cinematic perpetuity in The Last Tango in Paris (1972). Three actresses—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—recite Schneider's interview responses, nearly word for word, with a few amendments offered by the actresses themselves. It is “men who hold the power” in the film industry, Schneider says; Maïga adds that it is “white men.”
Maria Schneider, 1983 asks who has the agency to narrativize their own life. Not Schneider, and not women. But individual refusal cascades into collective refusal: the film concludes with Sandoval, the third actress portraying Schneider, walking out of the film's purview, but not before posing the question: “Would you be able to distinguish what you see from the force of a film?” Subrin’s short invents an agency that lived reality had failed to endow upon a subject. But Subrin's film also acknowledges the specificity of what it reenacts—the lived experience of Maria Schneider—and its mode of reenactment—actresses who have also faced disenfranchisement and disempowerment from the industry.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
What do we see when we see Elliot Rodger on screen? Bonello does not consider the specificity of Rodger to the same extent as Subrin, merely using him as a totem of repressed modern masculinity. Rodger is cast onto the screen as a contemporary reference; he’s echoed verbatim, yet hollowed of his contextual significance. The contemporary American sense of Rodger—his deeds and his aftermath—contravene Bonello's representation. This tension offers its own epiphany, revealing that what lies beneath the starkly beautiful, characteristically vacant imagery of The Beast are paltry ideas. Louis-as-Rodger is evidently meant to embody the polarities of fear and love that haunt the contemporary man. We are shown, throughout the film, enough of what fear means; what, however, of love?
A purposeful air of glibness is part of the critique in Saint Laurent and House of Tolerance. The glibness of Saint Laurent declares the problem of a consumerist culture that has itself turned politically glib; the glibness of House of Tolerance is wonderfully pointed and sardonic, showcasing how nineteenth-century sex workers have been calcified into sexual objects. But in The Beast, that same characteristic glibness is absent of the same critical force.
Think again of the moment when Louis asks Gabrielle to pose as a doll, making an ambiguous expression “that pleases all.” Such an expression surely “pleases all” because it contains dimensions both shallow and profound—shallow, in the sense that her expression confronts us with the superficiality of a visage, and profound, in the sense of all the expression's potential meanings. This expression seems to epitomize Bonello's cinematic strategy: In his images and ideas, he veers between both shallowness—or, “thinness,” as MacKay described his performance—and depth. His oscillation between the two, his lack of commitment to one polarity, is ironic, glib. This is why the reenactment of Elliot Rodger feels both slightly unnerving—funny, even—and chilling. This is also why for a film that is about the importance of love—in fact, love's duty, against all fears—The Beast feels cold.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
Then there is the novella by Henry James, which seems to intuitively understand something that The Beast does not. The Beast in the Jungle need only explicitly mention romantic “love” a handful of times, yet the novella itself is rich with ideas about what love is, what it could be, what it cannot be. Much happens in The Beast; not so in The Beast in the Jungle, where the main event is the passage of time and mortality in spite of love unrealized. The novella finds its heat in its own stillness, in John's stubborn refusal to move toward the realization of love. The novella posits a theory of love in its absence, composed of statuary moments between John and May belied by unnerving desire, suspicion, and longing. When John Marcher meets May Bartram again in the very beginning of the novella, not only is their meeting a felt “sequel,” but
He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn’t know what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware—yet without a direct sign from her—that the young woman herself hadn’t lost the thread. She hadn’t lost it, but she wouldn’t give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past would have had no importance. If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but take things as they came.
Love, expressed here in just a flicker, is fire, electricity, a whole life, a destiny that invariably walks us toward one another. Here, already, is some sense of love that meets the reader's heart. For all The Beast's conceits—three timelines, shifting genres, reenactments, green screens, dolls—nowhere in its two and a half hours does it approach the depth of feeling, nor that Jamesian curiosity about what love is, how it can affect us, how it might explode unexpectedly when, in Bonello’s 2044, we’re asked to suppress it. The idea that murderous incels could counterfactually be men of deep love is cryptic, but this remains as far as Bonello is willing to venture, his most demonstrative provocation spun from James’s ideas. A film about love must surely affect us beyond glamorous aesthetics and visceral shocks. Just as the reenactment of Elliot Rodger lacks critical precision, The Beast lacks emotional precision. Stylish images can only offer limited passion; the rest requires the strength of ideas.