Léa Seydoux stands against a green screen in the opening of The Beast
Chris Forrester dissects the heady themes of Bertrand Bonello’s genre-defying romance and the Henry James novella that inspired it. Spoilers ahead!
“The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.” — Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
It’s with a shattering intensity that the protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James’s 1903 novella about a man plagued by a fear of some awful fate so intense he can only think of it as a Beast lurking just out of sight, realizes the irony of that fate — that in the isolation of his fear he has condemned himself to a life alone, and that that fate is the one whose snarls from the shadows he has feared all along.
Dropping the title’s in the Jungle in spite of a much denser palette of settings, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023) takes James’s core concept, if not his entire premise, and locates it time and again across a slippery, genre-hopping triptych of almost-love stories. Where once the great horror was of one’s only go at life slipping away lovelessly in a burst of eternal sorrow, here it becomes a pain suffered again and again through many lives. The Beast lurks in the shadows of 1910 Paris, where a pair of lovers drown trying to escape a burning doll factory during the city’s Great Flood; it growls from uncomfortable proximity in 2014 Los Angeles, while a man torn between lifelong hatred of women and the possibility of love shoots an actress in the head; its teeth glint in the neon lights of 2044 when a process of “emotional purification” intended to make its undertakers better job candidates dooms a pair of would-be lovers before they can consummate their feelings.
It’s the latter segment that gives The Beast its frame story — it’s through the emotional purification process that the protagonist re-experiences past lives in 1910 and 2014 — but the former that contains its closest translation of James. In The Beast in the Jungle, John Marcher crosses paths with May Bartram, whom he met ten years prior in Italy, and she remembers the strange secret of his paralyzing fear. She, fascinated by his certainty of an awful fate, becomes his close companion for life, and he, terrified of bringing another into his doom, maintains a careful distance between the two of them; though we see its potential, no romance is ever consummated between the two of them and it is not until her passing that he realizes the simple self-perpetuation of his long-feared fate.
Thwarted romance takes on an agonizing omnipresence in The Beast, beginning in Bonello’s Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993)-esque invocation of James’s original story. His Marcher is Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux, in the finest performance of the year) and her confidant is Louis (George MacKay, chameleonic). They meet, as roughly in James’s novella, at a salon party and mutually recall the exchange of her secret in Naples. Again, they become close, and again she holds back (peculiarly, his dreadling here is married), in large part for fear of the Beast. But Bonello’s are stranger and more elemental interpretations, and here amidst the floodwaters of Paris and the flames of a burning factory, Gabrielle’s doom does come and in spite of her protective romantic hesitancy toward Louis, it claims the two together.
The first of three horrible fates
Here is the most classical of the film’s reinterpretations, sharply realized in gorgeous period costuming and detail so as to assert for the material an aching melodramatic core. Here and beneath the glossier surfaces of the 2014 and 2044 passages, one feels quite purely the pangs of unconsummated desire as piercingly as in The Age of Innocence or In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000).
It’s easy to invoke cinematic comparisons for any one passage of The Beast (you might compare 2014 to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… or 2044 to Blade Runner 2049, even if neither comparison quite encapsulates the richness of Bonello’s achievement) because his transmutation of James’s material into century-spanning romantic oddity involves a careful pastiche of cinephilic influences as much as the conceit and emotional impact of its inspiration. To adapt the eloquent verbosity and aching interiority of James’s prose to the screen would be a fool’s errand (how many have crumbled attempting their own take on The Turn of the Screw?), but the great achievement of The Beast is to preserve its precise emotional effects within a vessel not only cinematic, but in thoughtful conversation with the cinema’s own relationship to such material.
Once Upon a Time… in 2014 Los Angeles
The same holds true of its gender-swapped lead. Long has the cinema had its own complicated relationship with female torment — “The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough,” Hitchcock once said, and the essential conundrum of his films was that from that endeavor sprung all the complexity and concern he gave them — and in assigning the story’s great Fear to his woman rather than his man, Bonello places The Beast in a direct lineage of women whose onscreen torment unleashed some primal repressed emotion. Most directly acknowledged is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-2017), whose blood-curdling Laura Palmer screams and red-curtained backdrops are sharply echoed in The Beast’s opening image, Gabrielle’s scream every bit as piercing as Laura’s and the greenscreen that backdrops it an echo of Lynch’s iconic red curtains.
There are three such screams in The Beast (one is notably absent from the 1910 segment and the first implicitly a part of 2014 but displaced from it in the narrative sequence). Each, a testament to Seydoux’s rattling, ravishing performance(s?), encapsulates with all the fury of Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) or all the terror of Janet Leigh in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), the existential anguish that threads the three timelines together and punctuates them with a sense of doom. And together they come to reflect on the film’s constructedness. Here, the opening image may offer more than just raw emotion, but a suggestion of artifice — not only in the green-screen film-set staging, but also in its dubious relationship to the narrative. The woman appears to be 2014 Gabrielle, an actress, and she seems to be receiving directions from a voice offscreen, but the scene described will recur within the house the directions suggest later within the film, and the voice is Bonello’s own, credited as “Réalisateur fond vert” or “Green Screen Director.” Whether an acknowledgment of artifice, a suggestion of fabricated emotion bursting forth into the real, or both is unclear, but such a provocative opening image (including a title card that arrives as the image of a screaming Seydoux dissolves into glitchy, pixelated abstraction) begets an uneasy sense of fabrication to what follows.
The shadow of The Beast
We might here turn back to Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive (2001), another LA-set drama of doomed romance and crumbling unreality, prefigures The Beast’s structure of maybe-lived-maybe-not loves within the mind of a woman facing down the existential terror of a doomed life. A more literal-minded filmmaker might have regarded the material with a simpler sense of the real and unreal (that Gabrielle’s emotional purification is simply showing her past loves whose traumatic unconsummatedness lingers on her spirit), and a less tactful one might have fallen headlong into the (admittedly great) pleasures of its potential for genre pastiche. But the triumph of Bonello’s approach is that it allows sensation to overwhelm interpretation; as in Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway (1997) or Inland Empire (2006), the aching heart of the material lies not in a precise dichotomy of real and unreal so much as in what just is. We, like the dreamer of these haunted dreams or the tormented re-liver of these repressed memories, feel them all the same.
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the finest film of 2023/24 (depending on who’s counting; for ease, we’ll just say both) screens February 7 at 7pm as part of the International Art House Series.