The Beast
Continuing the blast against Brexit, the Beast continues the trend of Brits in indie European cinema. On one hand this movie is one which makes you go ‘what on earth have I just watched?’ (So the best kind of art film!) On the other hand it makes you come out feeling afraid of the dark.
Imagine Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, only uber dystopian and dealing with past lives. Mash this up with Everything Everywhere All At Once (but no martial arts) and the look of Russian Ark. Dash in some Orwell 1984. Then you have The Beast.
Interwoven stories form the narrative. We start in a fin de siecle love story, very Proust/Henry James, almost Swann in Love. A beautiful woman and talented pianist Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) is married to a loving doll factory owner Georges (Martin Scali), but she also has a thing going on with a past boyfriend Louis Lewanski (George MacKay), who keeps turning up. He promises to always be by her side.
Mixing French and English, and some stunning historical costumes (some of the best I’ve seen on screen in a long time, especially the extras) the woman hunts for her husband. We see her fielding unwanted artistic admiration (from the artist and designer Paul Poiret), offers of drinks — finding instead a room with her former lover alongside some very modern art. She’s filled with a deep sense of foreboding of something terrible happening, and an irrational fear of pigeons. She also remains emotionally distant, as though she’s waiting for something — or someone.
In the future, the same woman is having horrible Bondian needles in ears to wipe (purify) her ‘past lives’ and their associated generational trauma. ‘Cos AI is in charge now and emotions are messy, irrational and unprofitable. But what will this mean? Will she have any memories left — or feelings? But in this world, where everything seems to be bought and sold by genetic fingerprints, where everyone looks the same, dresses the same and wears a mask moving in isolation, there seem to be issues. Several times she returns to a secret club (which keeps changing era and look), but dancing and self-expression seems to be taboo. We also don’t talk about Louis.
It’s also very Minority Report as she lies encased in a vat of black goop. In the Flaubert version, water is flooding Paris — causing a terrible fire in her husband’s modern celluoid doll producing factory. If only he’d stuck to china dolls…
There’s also another story about a modern-day (ish) model who ends up being stalked by a terrifying Incel-inspired young man. This is the most worrying and disturbing as the young man threatens her within the home she’s looking after for a friend. There’s an earthquake. More disturbing still, is that the young man looks like her lost love, and the woman seemingly tries to love, placate and please an abusive, violent man. It’s really grim — a twisted Beauty and the Beast. Somehow George MacKay gives a sense of desperate humanity to this isolated young man as he spouts his Andrew Tait offerings to video. But we feel the woman’s own creeping sense of horror as he lurks outside, follows her car in his vehicle, videos a murderous last message outside of her home, and enters her house, finding her locked inside a room. Even worse, when she unlocks the door….
Mixed in with this is a fortune teller, pigeons, dancing, dolls and the friend Kelly as recurring motifs. The models themselves almost become dolls as they are surgically enhanced, told to walk ‘gracefully’ to command and perform to green screen for commercials. In the end Lea Seydoux is a flawed narrator as Kelly (Guslagie Malanda) isn’t her friend, so much as someone who she can’t trust, acts as a minder and who she manipulates to get back to the man she loves — only to be devastated by the terrible awful in the end. Worse then something nasty in the woodshed, no matter how Lea Seydoux’s character fights — she ends up decimated in some way, separated from the man she cherishes. For he’s also been ‘purified’ and no longer loves her, just ‘likes’ her and wants to be her work buddy. We see this in his face as they dance together.
While you may end up pulling a ‘whaaat?’ face by the end. it also asks some deeper questions about what it means to be human, what makes us distinctly human, and the impact that emotions (even ones we label ‘negative’) and memories, experiences, have in creating our humanness. Lea Seydoux manipulates Kelly to get to her loved one, because she is ‘just’ a doll and not capable of real feelings and actions. Though Kelly would seem to argue otherwise. Another version of Kelly does some very cruel things to her suffering cat, the one she loves, apparently showing her fakeness and lack of humanity. Models are positively stampeded towards plastic surgery to make them more employable; much like the purification surgery removes the affects of emotions and experiences, and makes apparently more reliable, consistent employees, suitable for higher status jobs.
In previous versions, it’s fear that holds either partner back and kills the relationship; in the end, a lack of emotions (affects) separates them — and not in the way you expect. There’s always a dramatic disaster — fire and flooding; locked and unlocked doors; stalking and threat of murder and torture; control by inhuman forces; an earthquake; social rejection and being together alone
Great performances, really iffy modern day narrative with stalky Incel guy, hopefully lots of stunt pigeons and a wonderful Fortuny dress. So many hats! Will make you use your many emotions (be glad you’ve got them!) and you may discover that you too can’t watch Lea Seydoux apparently having a stiletto needle drilled into her ear canal!
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