Like a shade-less Saharan sand dune without the sense of humour, THE BEAST is a shape shifting experience bending time, optics and impending doom.
Like a Saharan sandscape it offers major mirage and minor oasis, both in the form of Léa Seydoux, the undisputed star of the film.
Loosely inspired by the Henry James short story, The Beast in the Jungle, THE BEAST is not some safari saga about big game hunting but a concentration of James’ main conceit, that of the hidden beast, of the fear of loving.
Bertrand Bonello’s film unfolds over three distinct periods: 1910,2014 and 2044 taking 155 minutes to cover almost as many years.
Each time, the personal catastrophe of a couple is linked to a general one: the Paris flood in 1910, a kind of behavioral amnesia linked to social networks and the Internet in 2014, and the even worse catastrophe of a world without catastrophe, a soulless void of a world in 2044.
The portrait of a woman that Seydoux plays almost turns into a documentary about an actress, who may or may not be Seydoux. There is constant allusion to Madame Butterfly in THE BEAST, but one is drawn, rather, to imagine Seydoux as Madame Bovary, Flaubert being achingly akin to James in certain regard to passion and intellect and class.
At times the filmmaker gets wondrously close to the source material – These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss.
Other times the film becomes increasingly obscure, opaque, frustratingly obfuscated.
George Mackay as the male quotient of this infuriating romance is fine, especially his depiction of a 2014 Incel. It is chilling.
When the end finally comes, we are serenaded with Evergreen by Roy Orbison. A Big Oh! rather than an Ah!
