It hadn’t come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of accident

THE BEAST

2024

Directed by Bertrand Bonello

Written by Benjamin Charbit, Guillaume Bréaud, and Bertrand Bonello (based on the novella "The Beast In the Jungle" by Henry James)

Spoilers: moderate

The Beast is one of those movies that comes along with some regularity, where everyone falls over themselves to "get it," and, frankly, I hope you do; it is an adaptation (for a certain definition of "adaptation") of Henry James's 1903 novella, "The Beast In the Jungle," as didactic a piece of literature as it's possible to imagine that maintains the reputation that it does, and furthermore written in an overly burdensome style that I sure don't remember being so unwieldy in Washington Square.  In any event, it would be impossible not to "get" "The Beast In the Jungle," though in fairness Bertrand Bonello's film, The Beast, is a very un-literal adaptation of it.  A literal adaptation would be what are plainly two romantic asexuals sitting in rooms together until one of them dies, whereupon the other realizes they probably ought to have gotten married and the reader wonders what significant difference it would have made to their warm, chaste friendship of many years; this isn't actually what you're supposed to take away from the novella, and was evidently not James's semi-or-even-quasi-autobiographical intention, which was all about fear and passion, but it is altogether impossible to imagine its protagonist becoming sexually aroused, while if his lady friend could, then, honestly, he's not the one who's wasted his life.  This is somewhat different in the movie, but not as different as you'd prefer or, I'd wager, as the movie thinks it is.  Still, the film, at 145 minutes, best achieves its aim of adapting the ~21,000 word novella by being twice as long as it needs to be to get its point across.

I don't think I'm being too arrogant to say I "get" The Beast; I think I do, I just don't care, and very little effort has been put into it to make me do so.  It starts off with a metacinematic gesture that is supposed to be interesting and never has enough leaned upon it to actually make it interesting, indicating that it has a powerful tool at its disposal that it's just not going to put to much use: so, in what is either her guise as one Gabrielle Monnier, aspiring actor, or is just Léa Seydoux, the lead actor in The Beast, we start with Gabrielle/Seydoux playing out a scene to come much later in the movie under the direction of (presumably) Bonello, against a giant greenscreen, so that the only things "real" are Seydoux herself, the disembodied voice of a filmmaker, and a knife.  The scene involves her fighting for her life against something that doesn't exist, which is what the kids call "a choice" when we find out what that something is, though I'll hasten to say I don't think that's the intention, but to simply contextualize the entirety of The Beast as a complete artificial construct.  (Though if the film actually uses compositing in this scene or any other, aside from—probably—some stuff in knee-high water, it's not obvious, even when the cinematography has been designed to make entire compositions look fake and cruddy; and I'll say that that's a mistake because if you're doing the compositing too well, then the conceit isn't actually functioning.)  The idea is, as will soon become apparent, that in our 21st century there is no longer real experience, only fake, mediated experience, nor real emotion, and only the simulacrum of the same.

Next we see her, it's the year 2044, after some manner of troubles (portentously dated to 2025), which have been ended only by the ascendance of the AI overlords who now run the world, human emotion having been proved so damaging to human survival that this seemed like the better option.  Most everyone is unemployed, and the few people who do have jobs, like Gabrielle, are still sorted by purity, which is to say psychological purity, and Gabrielle is still too much of a throwback in her emotionality, so claims the movie and occasional glimmers of Seydoux's performance, to do more fulfilling work than monitoring data core temperatures.  (It is also a world, incidentally, where everyone is wearing a full face-obscuring tinted mask when outdoors, which is probably meant to suggest they've been discouraged from making eye contact with strangers, given that they pointedly don't wear them indoors, though I did have the thought "so your movie got delayed by COVID."  It's ultimately just some junky sci-fi dress, I think, though the most impressive digital effects in the film, I suspect, are the enormously, improbably deserted expanses of Paris we see.)  Nevertheless, Gabrielle submits herself to a DNA cleansing that will take her through her previous couple of past lives, which will purge her of her remaining overly-strong affect—perhaps it goes without saying that none of this is "the Henry James adaptation" yet, though I'll admit to being annoyed at the deliberate gobbledygook of the science fiction.  So they throw her in a bath of black oil and the show gets started.

We go back to 1910, this being a not-entirely-arbitrary re-situation of the events of the 1903 novella, most of which is surely intended to have taken place over the last decade or two of the 19th century rather than, you know, being speculative fiction about the early 1920s ("1910" is not exactly the same as "1880," but let's let Bonello have that one).  Here we have our Gabrielle, a married pianist who makes a reunion at a party with a slightly younger man who remembers her well, though he recalls with no accuracy any of the details of their first meeting, years earlier.  This is Louis (George MacKay), bearing a great resemblance to another man she's already met in the future, at the same emotion-cleansing facility; what made Louis remember Gabrielle, anyway, is a confidence she shared with him, that she has, for as long as she's remembered, nursed a premonition of doom for herself and anyone around her, and that this was why she rejected him back then.  She has, obviously, set some of this aside (at which point, frankly, the novella's heart's been ripped out and stomped on a little), though when asked, she confesses that she feels that her premonition is still true.  They rekindle their association, which persists into the Great Flood of Paris (hence 1910), a symbol that speaks for itself, as does her marriage to the owner of a doll factory, but not a symbol that is necessarily mirrored in Gabrielle's ultimate decision.

More than a century later, in 2014, Gabrielle's in California, and so is Louis, the former eking out a living as a housesitter for a fabulous mansion while trying to find her break as an actor, the latter a 30 year old undergrad who is, and I mean this with the utmost literalism, Elliot Rodger, with the exception that (unless I misremember Rodger) he's fixated himself on a specific individual woman to annihilate, namely Gabrielle.

This pair of stories are experienced via brain machine in the future, and in series (you'll find comparisons to the magnificently cross-cut cross-time epic Cloud Atlas, and these comparisons are, accordingly, entirely inapposite), and there's very little sense of them having that much to do with one another.  It's more like an anthology film, where none of the segments are good, though that's possibly too generous, because in an anthology film they would still be striving to be good, or at least complete experiences unto themselves, and I'm not sure it's actually a priority with this.  They are instead intended to illuminate the film's thesis, and, get this, it is broadly similar to "The Beast In the Jungle's," which is to say it's the same as a great many things that are also about how a life lived in fear, especially of our own feelings or human connection, is not much of a life at all.  This basic, at-bottom-agreeable idea is inflected and supplemented by a profound cynicism about the possibility of living without fear of the same in the 21st century, with the prospect of living out authentic emotional lives—from manifestations of feeling as simple as "talking to a girl" to as complex as "making a proper fucking motion picture"—being rendered increasingly difficult by the overwhelming speed of technological change and a culture headed towards complete atomization.

In other words, it's the most archly-intellectual argument imaginable about the importance of feeling and acting upon our emotions, that activates virtually none; and having chosen intellectualism, it still ain't all that smart either, or at least not penetrating or incisive.  For one thing, it's a movie about "the digital age" that doesn't appear to be aware of how the experience of using the Internet had changed since the early 00s by 2014, and has a vision for it that's mainly just annoying, CPU-melting pop-up ads.  Now, I'm sure that's an intentional albeit not-funny joke, but it does underscore how little this is actually engaging with anything.  It is a 145 minute observation that the social mores of 1910 could inhibit emotional expression, that the fragmented culture of 2014 (and counting) has channeled emotional expression into narcissistic, socially destructive feedback loops, and that we're headed towards a world where that social destruction will be abated only by such an intensive, invasive therapeutic culture, and even further social isolation, that we're all going to wind up a bunch of inhuman droids.  I mean, if I agree with you, shouldn't I like your movie more?

But there is precious little more to get, besides that bulletpointed synopsis of its argument, from this whole 145 minute film, which, incidentally, really is fully 145 minutes, thanks to its insulting end credits novelty (it's a QR code that, I assume, sends you to a YouTube video or something—I did not partake because fuck that in its fucking ear—that, for Christ's sake, even makes Tár's ridiculous "end credits at the beginning" look like a good idea).  The exception is some occasional pieces of delicacy from Seydoux that don't ever threaten to get away from the overbearing dullness of the movie.  MacKay is mostly fine, but he did teach me one thing that hadn't previously occurred to me, but in retrospect does seem obvious, that "playing the alien in a human's skin that was Elliot Rodger" would be an incredibly difficult acting challenge.  Anyway, he is operating at a disadvantage: doing Rodger, down to his situation and almost his precise terminology—"ultimate gentleman," because, what, is "supreme gentleman" under fucking copyright? whose toes do you think you're stepping on?—but doing that explicitly as a 30 year old renders the whole thing sort of pointless in its artificiality.  (Who do you think you are, Rodney Dangerfield?  Yeah, sure, "we're all gonna get laid" overpromises on the college experience, but even Rodney Dangerfield wasn't trying to fuck the co-eds.)

The 1910 segment, then, I guess does embody its argument about the diminution of the possibility for human emotional expression, inasmuch as it's like a 1930s melodrama that, the latter being closer to the culture depicted, could still perceive the social conventions restraining the passions of its stories as real forces; Seydoux and MacKay and Bonello make no indication that they can, and this is, therefore, a lot more like one of our latterday period pieces, that wanly try to be like a Greta Garbo movie, and fail because they're just going through the motions.

The blank surprise on their faces is coming from their imminent deaths.

The 2014 incel chapter makes me suspect that this was what Bonello was most interested in, but also that he's keenly aware that it's way too volatile to be upfront in what interested him about it, so he takes every pain to couch it in terms of a sci-fi/psychothriller structuralist exercise.  Hence there's no particular engagement with the emotionality of contemporary social dislocations, not even any exploration of "what makes the incel cel?" (though it's probably his haircut), just the outward manifestations of it as portrayed on Louis's stupid video uploads that are just almost word-for-word Rodger's crap; it's just so utterly unimaginative.  (If you're looking for some broader examination of the incel movement as a frightening new kind of misogyny that treats women like an enemy nation, basically adopting the same strategy and indeed tactics as, for instance, Hamas, in an insane attempt to instill mutual hatred and some kind of generational struggle against, once again, a gender, well, this isn't that.  In fairness, I suppose I don't imagine that it strictly needs to be, but it probably does still need to have psychologically-accessible characters.)  It's trying for some sort of catharsis, by virtue of its cross-time romance, but it's also dancing around that catharsis so anxiously that it explicitly, as a matter of form and editing, has a hard time deciding how it ought to end this segment, which is the closest it gets to being interesting, but its refusal to bring its ideas into any kind of focus puts paid to that.  (Now, I will say that the actual ending, in 2044, is pretty good; it is a total rip-off of a particular sci-fi movie from 1978, where it was, as you'd surmise, more powerfuly-felt.)  It is, at least, broadly accurate, I'd say, in its notion "incels are living in fear, much as James's protagonist did," but it has no specific ideas how and why that might be the case, and so what anyway?  I could get that from any given thinkpiece; my inescapable feeling was that this bold, brave art film about the absolute necessity of expressing vital emotions in an authentic way against a society that has relegated such things to narrow, approved channels is, itself, kind of chickenshit.

It also looks as boring as you'd expect any movie made in 2024 to be, I guess on purpose; you'll recall I mentioned a metacinematic conceit, which should have been a fun way to visualize Gabrielle's emotional process, and comes up startlingly seldom, in no small part because there are very few instances that break that ice anyway.  But it's kind of astonishing how similar the 1910, 2014, and 2044 segments all look in their plastic inhumanity, despite the aspect ratio shenaniganry and, shockingly, the apparent utilization of literal different image reproduction media; to the extent there are differences, it's only in a "how would a cheap streaming entry into this genre look?" kind of way, 1910 coming off belligerently sterile, which only fades because you at least already expect the 2014 and 2044 segments to look sterile.  But the sterility of the story—a romance!—in a movie that is expressly about how the sterility of stories is bad, just depresses me.

Score: 4/10