What is the beast in one’s life? Is it added in post when an actress acts against a green screen? Is it artificial intelligence erasing past lives to heal, removing people’s emotions? Is it a disaster like Paris flooding? Is it unrequited love to an incel virgin? In Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, it’s all of these things in a sprawling time jumping sci-fi romance with a standout emotional performance by Léa Seydoux at the center of it all.
Loosely based on Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, Bonello’s film opens on Gabrielle (Seydoux) in 2014 as an actress in Los Angeles acting against a green screen where she’s supposed to see the shadow of a beast. Then she’s transported to the past, to the Belle Époque period in France in 1910 where she meets Louis (George McKay) at a party and they’ve met before, several years earlier. Louis says she talked about having a feeling of doom, that she feared something terrible would eventually strike and obliterate her.
In 2044, Gabrielle is interviewed by AI because she wants to be more useful than the job she has now. AI tries to convince her of the progress in humanity it’s created, that today there are no biased decisions made by someone depressed or annoyed, but she argues it’s hard to see it as progress with a 67% unemployment rate. In the past, she’s refused DNA cleansing of her past lives to remove strong emotions that may affect her work. AI says, “We figured out what Buddhism always knew, you review what has damaged you for centuries and get rid of it.” She finally decides to move forward and that’s the catalyst for Gabrielle looking at her past lives in 1910 and 2014.
The theme of the beast from the opening when she's acting against a green screen to the party in the past where Louis talks about a beast that was going to destroy her to Louis the incel in 2014, this beast seems to be a metaphor for the fears and anxieties that we all have. The beast is also most certainly AI in the foreboding future when it’s taken over much of the workforce and is trying to strip emotion from people and erase the past. It also seems like Gabrielle lives in a surveillance state in 2014 as she’s housesitting and the owner keeps calling about things he’s “heard from the neighbors,” which seems like a ploy because he seems to be watching her every move.
Award-winning French actress Léa Seydoux is known for her complex emotionally charged roles in films like Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue in the Warmest Color; Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen; Bond girl Madeleine Swann in Spectre and No Time to Die, and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch where she plays Simone, a prison guard and muse of imprisoned artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro). Her performance in The Beast carries the film where she essentially plays three different roles or versions of Gabrielle in the three time periods, each role carrying a different weight of their beast.
The Beast is filled with lavish production design by Katia Wyszkop (also the production designer on Farewell, My Queen and Diary of a Chambermaid starring Seydoux, and Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta) in the 1910 Paris scenes. Wyszkop takes a more minimalist approach for the 2044 future scenes where AI has taken over to show the coldness of an AI run world.
Ultimately, The Beast is one of those films to reflect on, to really analyze the themes and meanings Bonello looks to get across. Our past, our emotions is what makes us human. And trying to erase that like what AI does in the film, and what AI is doing right now in real life, is a threat to our humanity and to our survival. Highly Recommended.
What films would Bertrand Bonello’s time jumping sci-fi epic be good to program with for community screenings?
Right off the bat I kept thinking of the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas while watching The Beast, a film where actors including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess play different characters and races across six different time periods stretching from 1849 to 2321 in different countries. A heavily thematic and epic film, Cloud Atlas was my favorite film of 2012 and I remember walking out of the theater thinking, this is what it must have been like to see Star Wars back in 1977.
Another film that came to mind is Sally Potter’s Orlando where Tilda Swinton plays the titular character across 400 years and different gender identities. In Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s latest film Resurrection, a dying monster relives 100 years across dreams and the history of cinema.
These three films along with The Beast could fit into a series of screenings with the theme of Sci-Fi & Fantasy Time-Jumping Cinema.
How could The Beast be used in the classroom?
Since Bonello’s film is loosely based on Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, an assignment for students could be to read the novella, screen The Beast in class, and ask students to compare and contrast the two.
For extra credit, students could track down (or teachers could screen) Patric Chiha’s film The Beast in the Jungle (2023), also an adaptation of James’ novella, that takes a different route with the material, and add that to the compare and contrast writing assignment. Chiha’s film premiered at Berlin Film Festival in 2023 and was released in France and Belgium. It has yet to be released in the US. Les Films du Losange released Chiha’s film in France and may have sales or education licensing rights for teachers who wish to screen in the classroom.
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