Review - The Beast
Directed by: Bertrand Bonello
Written by: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Breaud, Benjamin Charbit
Starring: Lea Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova
Running Time: 145 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Within in certain modes of modern story telling, there seems to be a want to have a variety of tones and settings within one narrative. This can illustrate our very omnivorous appetite for storytelling of all genres and styles. But inversely can speak to audiences more fractured attention spans. Content delivery services giving you an unending yield of titles to fit any mood its subscriber can possibly be in. Bertrand Bonello’s new film ’The Beast’, seems to want to speak to the fractured nature of story telling within the confines of a few different genre’s and time periods.
‘The Beast’ is an unusual tale set in the near future about a woman who will be replacing all the blood in her body, and in doing so, erasing her past lives. We see three different timelines permeate her memory as this process goes on, exploring turn of the century France, Los Angeles in 2014, and the future in 2044. Our lead Gabrielle must navigate love, loss and destiny throughout these various time frames.
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay have plenty of chemistry and a variety of scenes to play in. I think for some with less patience, this film will be a challenging watch.
The stories and their flow are certainly not hard to follow plot wise. But sometimes when you macro out and really parse the various storylines, their points and aim are more engaging on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one. It is without a doubt a total showcase for Seydoux as one of the most compelling faces that has graced our cinemas of recent. She’s able, at the drop of a hat, to lock into whatever reality the film is throwing at her, and no doubt make you engaged with what is about to happen.
It has a structure similar to ‘Cloud Atlas’ with the same leads playing vastly different people, and also reminded me of the film ‘Holy Motors’ which was also a very meta- narrative of performances within a variety of genres and set ups. I’ll admit when I walked out of this film, I felt as if I had been messed with by the filmmaker rather than engaged with. But having some space with it and letting it mill about in the back of my mind, it was a film I thought on with interest weeks after. Which is more than I can say about many of the films I saw at New York Film Festival.
It definitely is an interesting intellectual exercise with good performances in it. While it swings for the fences it may not work for everyone. I think what will really push people out of their comfort zone is where the film dips into very metaphorical and meta narrative concepts that can come across as flippant and sometimes esoteric. But is certainly aiming to say something about the stories we tell and the roles men and women have cast themselves in throughout our modern history. Its attempt at the universal may come at the expense of the personal and specific, but is certainly a journey worth taking, if you are up to it.
