2024 Top Ten List #9 The Beast (La Bête)

 

Director Bertrand Bonello

Bonello on the set with Léa Seydoux

THE BEAST (La Bête)          A-                                                                                              France  Canada  (146 mi)  2023  d: Bertrand Bonello

The first idea was to do a melodrama, which is something I’ve never done before, and that drove me to a short novel by Henry James called The Beast in the Jungle.  For me, it’s one of the most heart-breaking, beautiful, and awful stories you can imagine.  I wanted to mix this with some genre [elements], because, in James’s novel, love and fear are so related.  So I wanted to have some ‘fear’ scenes,  and there is almost a slasher movie inside this film.  The other thing, that came quite quickly, was the desire to do a film, for the first time in my life, in which the main character is female.           —Bertrand Bonello

One of the better films exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality, revealing just how elusive reality can be.  Bonello, who is also a professor at the prestigious La Fémis, is a French director whose films deal with provocation, the difficulty of human relations, the anguish of living, the sexual condition, and abstraction, from the opulently beautiful House of Tolerance (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close) (2011) to the misguided radicalism of the selfie generation in Nocturama (2016).  Yet it’s his first film, the rarely screened SOMETHING ORGANIC (1998), that really stands out, made for $100,000 and shot in just 15 days, where especially memorable is a woman’s inexplicable journey to the farthest northern region in Canada, where she’s the lone female in a sparse makeshift town enveloped in snow next to an oil rig on Hudson Bay, where all that’s open is a drinking establishment, expressed in extreme quiet, where she eventually has a drink with every guy in town, leading to staggering consequences.  While that is a minimalist aesthetic, this massively ambitious effort is a riveting, two-and-a-half-hour mind-altering, sci-fi adaptation of the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle (which can be read in its entirety in less time than it takes to view this movie), a cautionary tale where a man refuses to love as he’s overcome by a belief that something horrible will happen, so he puts his life on hold, postponing everything, entering a metaphoric waiting room, until it becomes apparent that his anxious-ridden withdrawal from life *is* the monster he’s been avoiding.  But this is no literary adaption, as the director instead expands upon his own wildly inventive themes, mixing classical and contemporary, switching the gender to a female perspective, as we are immersed into the life of a woman named Gabrielle Monnier (the utterly fabulous Léa Seydoux, a once-in-a-generation talent with astonishing assurance and range) spanning three different time periods, each referencing a timeline of emotions through real-life historical catastrophes, the flooding of Paris in Belle Époque France in 1910, a period when fears and emotions are completely repressed, a Los Angeles earthquake in 2014 when they are overexpressed and overwhelming, and a placeless, dystopian future of 2044 when they are totally absent, as artificial intelligence has taken over the world.  In each time period she bumps into the same man in her life, Louis Lewanski (British actor George MacKay in a role initially envisioned for Gaspard Ulliel, to whom the film is dedicated, who died tragically in a ski accident in 2022), where her connection to him is clouded in mystery and intrigue, yet she is intrinsically drawn to him.  Like a time-travel story, reminiscent of the largesse and ominous feel of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), they are destined to find one another through space and time, consumed by the deep-seated terror that some strange, horrible unknown is about to obliterate her, where that fear prevents either of them from realizing who they want to be.  Curiously, there is another film adapting the same Henry James novella, Austrian filmmaker Patric Chiha’s THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE (2023), taking place in a nightclub awaiting an impending apocalyptic event.  Rejected by the Cannes Film Festival, it instead premiered in Venice and has played the festival circuit.  Structurally, the closest thing this resembles is Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), especially the erasure of memory, as in the future humans are viewed as a useless burden, where emotions are perceived as a weakness and a threat to a productive society, leaving only menial jobs available, nothing that requires any intelligent aptitude, so in hopes of obtaining a better job (they cross paths during interviews), Gabrielle reluctantly undergoes a DNA purification procedure that will wipe out her strongest emotions, described as “affects,” in an effort to find a more fulfilling job while keeping pace with more productive AI counterparts in the workforce.  But in doing so, she experiences flashbacks to previous lives, each containing traumatic memories.  Written by Bonello with contributions from Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit, even composing his own musical score with his daughter Anna, this is a wild ride of a movie with constantly shifting time periods, mood alterations, and atmospheric shifts, with brief snippets from Harmony Korine’s TRASH HUMPERS (2009) thrown in for good measure, also Xavier Dolan (one of the producers) as the Alphaville (1965)-like AI voice of a computer, where very little is actually explained for viewers.  Veering into moments of horror, the entire film is embedded in a baffling enigma of bewilderment, something of a mindfuck of a movie, a sensory surprise, but in the best possible sense, as it’s an eerie and positively transfixing experience, where the title may actually refer to the fear of love, or the ferocity of unrequited love in a Sisyphean cycle of missed opportunities through the strands of time, potentially leaving one imprisoned in the purgatory of Sartre’s hellish No Exit, forever denied the essence of our own existence.  Even the end credits are shrouded in secrecy, as they are hidden behind a QR code, leading to an audience of smartphones pointing at the movie screen, revealing the credits and perhaps even an unseen sequence, before the lights come on in the theater.  The end.  But the end of what, you may ask?        

Using melodrama in a world that’s largely emotionless is not an easy thing to pull off, yet it’s handled deftly, as the filmmaker is directly involving the audience, making sure they feel the totality of the deeply unsettling experience.  Having worked with this director twice before in ON WAR (2008) and SAINT LAURENT (2014), Seydoux feels completely comfortable and at ease around him, having the freedom to explore on camera, as she has a very instinctual approach, sharing a common artistic vision, developing a firm belief they are collaborators.  Inspired by a crippling fear of the unknown, Bonello transposes the loneliness and fatalism of the source novel into a postmodern world obsessed with eliminating any connection to feeling anything at all, where there’s a core of anxiety running through this movie.  In our struggle against loneliness, we are oftentimes our own worst enemy, creating imaginary obstacles that stand in our way in order to justify our perceived failures.  While never actually specified, the world of the future has experienced some sort of natural disaster, possibly biological, as no cars are seen, no presence of social media, and no social life at all, while people on strangely empty streets are wearing protective face shields, with AI leading humanity into a newer, safer existence, where humans are expected to purge their flaws and weaknesses in order to conform to a more ordered and robotic future.  While some have suggested this film takes on the same grandiose scope as the Tom Tykwer and Wachowski sister’s sci-fi spectacle Cloud Atlas (2012), constantly moving backwards and forward in three different time frames, but that does this film a disservice, as it’s not anything like the jumbled mess of that film, displaying much more originality, told in an intensely personal manner that is uniquely challenging to viewers, seen through the eyes of a single character, where it’s the power of Seydoux’s extraordinary performance that compels viewers to stick around through the lengthy duration.  French-Canadian cinematographer Josée Deshaies, the director’s wife, is in complete command, providing the exactitude of Kubrickian compositions, including extreme close-ups, while also giving expression to the unspeakable.  The earlier historical period was shot on sumptuous 35mm, giving the screen a sensual texture, while the other sections were shot on digital, providing a stark contrast of sterility and coldness.  In the opening prologue sequence an actress is asked by the offscreen voice of Bonello, “Can you get scared by something that’s not actually here?”  She is then seen performing before a green screen in a horror movie, given specific instructions of what to do when the camera rolls (Ironically, Seydoux has largely avoided CGI scenes in her career choices, working almost exclusively in arthouse cinema).  In an empty room she screams, moves around, picks up a knife, and imagines herself confronting an unidentified beast, where the bare-bones nature of the minimalist set forces viewers to imagine the scene playing out in their minds before it happens, setting the stage for images and abstract ideas that follow.  It’s then over an hour or so before that scene actually appears in the movie.  It’s a clever device that works beautifully, where her instructions to scream recalls Fay Wray’s rehearsal instructions for a dreaded encounter in King Kong (1933), both terrified at the sight of some unseen beast, having absolutely no idea what it is, yet viewers can tell immediately that they’re in good hands, as this is a director who can navigate our journey through the unexpected, where it’s an exhausting yet fascinating aesthetic, not really like anything else we’ve seen.  That opening scene gives notice that the film is really about Léa Seydoux, as Bonello wrote it for her, and she is the driving force of the film.  Gabrielle is a virtuoso pianist in turn-of-the century Paris, gracious, well-mannered, and immaculately dressed, seen wandering around a museum-like setting at a high society party with champagne flowing as she strikes up a conversation with the elegantly dressed Louis, cutting a dashing figure in his tuxedo, admiring a series of paintings that she describes as “Violent, psychiatric, and rather beautiful.”  He then reminds her they met years ago when she somewhat drunkenly confided to him a startling fear, making him the only other person aware of her secret, recounting the conversation almost exactly, where he promises the utmost confidence in protecting her, a pledge she does not take lightly, impressed by how he so accurately remembers the precise details after the passing years, as it obviously made an impression on him, The Beast (La Bete) new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2023 YouTube (1:32), yet that fear of something terrible happening prevents them from fully consummating their love.  This rekindling of passion, however, which doesn’t exist in her overly safe marriage, suddenly coincides with taking a big risk.  Like a manifestation of her own fears, Paris is suddenly submerged in water, where a plan to escape together goes terribly awry, yet produces some of the most extraordinary images of the film. 

Combining elements of sci-fi, melodrama, horror, and romance, the film accentuates the intense loneliness and disconnection that has become a fixture of contemporary life, which is especially prominent in the English-speaking Los Angeles section, meeting at a retro-themed disco that changes musical styles by specifically chosen years, where Gabrielle is a model and aspiring actress house-sitting in a thoroughly modern glass mansion in the Hollywood Hills, while Louis is an angry man, a 30-year old virgin who only has sex in his dreams, consumed by an unrelenting hatred of women.  We see him literally stalking Gabriella from his car, planning a home invasion while broadcasting his misogynist manifesto live on YouTube, promising to punish women for not having sex with him, claiming he is “the perfect gentleman,” and that women who deny him sex are committing “reverse rape,” views that are so absurdly extreme they carry a bleak hilarity in their mocking commentary, yet his grandiloquent pronouncements are chillingly real.  The 2014 incel version of Louis, Incels (Involuntary celibates), is based on Eliot Rodger (Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became 'incel hero'), who killed six people and injured 14 others near the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California on May 23, 2014 before shooting himself in his own car.  Even the shattering experience of an earthquake fails to bridge the divide, as our young protagonists are brought together on the street afterwards, but there remains an eerie underlying discomfort, Clip: The Beast (Janus Films, Sideshow Films) YouTube (1:25), giving rise to scenes that resemble the car slasher mode of David Fincher’s ZODIAC (2007).  Whenever they encounter each other, a disquieting passion lingers between them, as she’s drawn to a version of him that seems to exist only in her head, yet the transformation of Louis is especially fascinating, unexpected, and highly disturbing.  In their initial encounter at the beginning of the film, he remarks, “Fulfillment lies in the lack of passion,” an astute observation that seems to accurately describe a sentiment felt throughout this film.  Even in 1910, when offered the opportunity to be painted by a Lucian Freud-like artist, she declines, claiming “I don’t want to lose my soul.”  And in the future, when contemplating an erasure of her most precious memories, she values her capacity to be moved and react authentically.  While there are ominous signs from the recurring appearance of pigeons, a pair of digital psychics, a computer malware infestation, and a connecting leitmotif from Puccini’s tragic opera Madame Butterfly, the strongest metaphor running throughout the film comes from a variety of dolls, an artificial model for what it is to be human, and a prototype for the possible replacement for the human race.  At the turn of the century, Gabrielle’s husband owns a doll factory, which she tours with Louis, who comments on their expressionless faces, designed “to appeal to everybody.”  One of the most haunting images in the film is her imitation of that “neutral” facial expression void of emotion that she holds, a look that lingers long afterwards (Is that our future?).  In 2044 after her DNA cleanse, an AI robot named Kelly (Guslagie Malanda from Alice Diop’s 2023 Top Ten List #3 Saint Omer) offers help and support, even planting a kiss while inviting her to have sex, but Gabrielle dismisses her as merely a doll.  Another weird doll sits on her desk during the LA house-sit making odd noises, as if having a life of its own, like an alter-ego of her character.  The film is an exploration of the existential, of what it means to be human, as Gabrielle is haunted by a lingering sense of dread, by her fear of “The Beast,” a metaphor for death and the fear of death, an experience only humans on this planet can comprehend, as Gabrielle fears “obliteration.”  The shocking red curtain finale is an overt reference to David Lynch, right down to the strains of Roy Orbison drawing a tear, Roy Orbison ~ Evergreen (Stereo) YouTube (2:51).  A final credit sequence without any listing of names, just a QR code, puts the final stamp on where the coldness of technology can finally take us in the future, a world with no feelings at all, where love is actually an impediment to personal fulfillment.  Whatever you may think of this film, it is uncompromising, resulting in a dizzying, often spellbinding experience, where the ambiguities are intentional and purposeful, as a film with this depth and magnitude is a constant reminder that the malaise of the present, surrounded by invisible forces we cannot control, is a harbinger for the future, where the decisions we make actually matter, leaving behind our human imprint.  

Bertrand Bonello on The Beast - Film Comment  Devika Girish interview podcast (35:22)

The Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)

 

Director Trân Anh Hùng

Trân with Dennis Lim at Film at Lincoln Center

Trân with Benoît Magimel

Trân with Juliette Binoche

culinary consultant Pierre Gagnaire

THE TASTE OF THINGS (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)            B                                        aka: The Pot-au-Feu                                                                                                                    France  Belgium  (135 mi)  2023  d: Trân Anh Hùng

The discovery of a new dish brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star.        — Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel)

Winner of the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, this deceptively simple film has little actual drama, chosen to represent France at the Oscars for Best International Film, passing over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) (2023).  From the maker of THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (2000), and Norwegian Wood (2010), Trân is a Vietnamese-born French filmmaker proficient in Vietnamese, French, and English languages, admittedly influenced by Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi.  His transcendent yet often ambiguous films are languid sensual experiences, offering a feeling as if the camera is floating on air, providing opulent textures in every frame, often providing a myriad of simultaneous events with multiple character relationships, showing a uniform theme of strong Asian cultural values, including family respect, bonding, and commitment.  Recalling works like Gabriel Axel’s BABETTE’S FEAST (1987) and Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994), this is an impassioned ode to gastronomy mixed with philosophical overtones set in France during the Belle Époque era of the 1880’s, where the gluttonous indulgence on display is utterly flabbergasting, where less than .01% of the world’s population since the dawn of time has ever eaten like this, something more commonly associated with the hedonistic indulgence of Nero before the fall of Rome, a stark contrast from the naturally healthy cuisine in Vietnam, with minimal use of fats or oils, where the rich butter-saturated excess is certainly not healthy and is what we commonly think leads to heart disease.  The one-note aspect of non-stop cooking in the kitchen and then taking such extreme pleasure in the taste afterwards is so exaggerated to the extreme that at times it can feel absurdly laughable, but that is not the director’s intentions, as this is a masterclass on the culinary art of taste and bourgeois refinement, where it’s basically an elaborately staged two-person play revolving exclusively around food, with the intermingling of two like-minded, creative souls, establishing a slow rhythm in the opening half hour, utilizing an immersive, near wordless restraint that follows the main protagonists as they skillfully move around the kitchen without all that cooking gadgetry used today, seen hovering over the stove, adding ingredients, tasting, issuing precise instructions, with the director creating a culinary ballet in motion. The carefully chosen sound design includes birds, insects, and farm animals that are heard through open windows, but never seen, with no accompanying music, only a few bars of Bellini’s Casta Diva at the opening while a Jules Massenet theme closes the film leading into the final credits.  The authenticity of the subject matter required a Michelin-winning chef, Pierre Gagnaire, as a culinary consultant, along with his chef Michel Nave preparing all the food used on the set, and actually appears in one scene rattling off the meticulously detailed twenty course menu for a wealthy Eurasian Prince that is so grandiose that it required 8-hours to consume.  Adapted from the early 20th century gastromic novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet (The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet) by Swiss writer Marcel Rouff, one of the founding members of the Académie des gastronomes in 1928, which unfolds in the 1830’s referencing Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a pioneering writer of gastronomic studies and French lawyer who briefly fled to the U.S. to survive the aftermath the French Revolution, where the enduring popularity of the book is clear, as it went through 50 French editions between 1924 and 2010, where Rouff was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur), France’s highest civilian honor.  But French cuisine was largely established by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known simply as Talleyrand, who became a leading member of the revolution, and Napoleon’s chief diplomat, where his meals were created by pâtissier Marie-Antoine Carême (Marie Antoine Careme - The First Celebrity Chef), the leading French chef of the early 19th century, who created the best cuisine possible for the influx of ambassadors from around the world.   

Most of the film takes place in the idyllic setting of a spacious 19th century chateau home kitchen that belongs to world-class gastronome and wealthy restaurateur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), shot at the Château du Raguin (château du Raguin - Chateau fort et Manoir) in the Maine-et-Loire region of western France, with its stone walls, wood burning stove ovens, copper pots, extensive vegetable and herb gardens, and fields of livestock, overseen by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, initially rejecting the role until it was expanded from a script rewritten with her in mind), an accomplished gourmet cook who’s able to bring his ambitious menus to life.  Much of what we see, and more importantly the way we see it, is through her eyes.  She is the behind-the-scenes force that orchestrates everything that transpires, seen waltzing around the stoves with stunning confidence and finesse, with so many things happening simultaneously.  And that’s pretty much it, and while Magimel and Binoche are exquisite throughout (in real life they have a child together, Hana, who reportedly cried at seeing this film bringing her parents back together), watching people cook for over two hours may not appeal to any but the most passionate food lovers, but what stands out isn’t so much what is being filmed, but the way that it is presented.  Like Trân’s other films, the utterly luxurious, choreographed elegance of Jonathan Ricquebourg’s luminous cinematography is the defining quality of the film, mostly shot on 35mm, and is nothing less than spectacular, along the lines of Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975) or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), taking full advantage of natural light and the bucolic countryside, mostly shot with roving handheld cameras that move with immaculate precision around the room, soaking in the meticulous preparation of food with loving adoration, with a candlelight dinner shot at the Château de Brissac, while another was shot alongside a shimmering moonlit lake.  The sensual bliss of how food is presented mirrors the romanticized relationship happening onscreen, both in body and spirit, as Eugénie has worked for Dodin for the last 20 years, known as “the Napoleon of culinary art,” and by turning the preparation of food into a kind of religious experience, it becomes their means of communicating, where cooking together is their prayerful dialogue, proof of how their relationship has evolved.  By now they’re able to complete each other’s thoughts in the kitchen, as their intimate working relationship with food is matched by his complete devotion to her, as he is in awe of what she can produce in the kitchen.  They also have a long-standing sexual attraction, living in separate quarters in the chateau where she is happy with the way things are, enjoying the teasing aspect of having the luxury of leaving her door opened or locked at night, which gives her the kind of freedom and control she thrives upon, a practice he has grown to accept.  Otherwise, this is a man’s world, as Dodin’s guests are exclusively male, a chauvinistic Greek chorus collection of some of the town’s most successful men, pillars of the community so to speak, always dressed in black, who share a common epicurean passion for the sheer delights of eating gourmet food, where the devotion these men express at the table, accompanied by only the finest French wines, exceeds the attention any of them ever show to the women in their lives, who are never seen, of course, as they prioritize food over anything else.  Accordingly, Eugénie, who never appears in the dining room, preferring to eat in the kitchen with the servants, has come to represent a kind of demigod in their eyes.  In this film, the sensual pleasure of food becomes linked to erotic passion, reminiscent of the culinary history of Afro-Brazilian Bahia culture on display in Hector Babenco’s sex farce Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976).  The film is dedicated to Trân’s wife, Trân Nu Yên-Khê, who not only starred in his first three films but also worked as an art director and costume designer for this film. 

As sublimely gorgeous as this film is to look at, given an impressionistic style of classical painting, this is as much about obsession as anything else, where there’s an indulgence factor that is disturbing, as this may be one of the unhealthiest films ever to grace the screen (vegetarians beware), setting a terrible example, and to simply overlook that is at one’s own peril.  Dodin confesses “it takes culture and a good memory to shape one’s taste,” yet one wonders why this extreme degree of cultural fascination is so representative of French culture, as so few can ever experience food on this level, or would ever want to, as it’s not much different than extreme sports, like skiing off a mountain, swimming the English Channel, or mountain climbing without ropes, where it’s all about the untainted purity of the experience.  Working alongside Eugénie in the kitchen are two dedicated young assistants, the ever faithful maid/sous chef Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and her child prodigy young niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), turning the room into a quiet and reflective sanctuary, pausing to season and taste along the way, with Dodin himself making regular appearances to surgically cut and prepare various fish, meats, and vegetables, all freshly acquired, combining exact proportions of spices, where the art of cooking is not for the faint of heart, but the result of meticulous measurements of exact science that produce such rare results, like a pot-au-feu, vol-au-vent, and an omelette norvégienne (baked Alaska), as these guests have such carefully trained palettes that anything less than extraordinary would immediately be recognized as lacking heart and soul.  It is a world of riches and earthly delights, the historical interest of kings and queens, as only they had the leisure time and unlimited finances for living such a lavish lifestyle to truly appreciate such delicacies that take all day to prepare, celebrating Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime white and red burgundies on earth, where Marie Antoinette, the last queen prior to the French Revolution, grew extremely unpopular with the public and was guillotined for living in such decadence.  The royal family would be delighted that such exaggerated culinary interest would suddenly recapture the interest of the nation some two hundred years later, as if exonerated from their crimes.  Despite years of playing coy, Eugénie finally agrees to Dodin’s marriage proposal, apparently won over by an elaborate meal he prepares especially for her, not allowing her to set foot in the kitchen, then watching her consume every morsel with great anticipation, including champagne pulled from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, literally sweeping her off her feet, where the individualism of their separate worlds are suddenly combined, with the marital celebration capturing the picturesque beauty of a Renoir painting, where friends are gathered around a long table situated alongside a lake for lunch, with the couple seen afterwards walking through a sun-kissed meadow.  But after a series of unexplained fainting spells, she mysteriously disappears from view, leaving a void not only in his life but the audience as well, suggesting there is, like a meal one consumes, an ephemeral nature to all of this, as the intensity quickly dissipates with Binoche out of the kitchen, creating an uneven aftermath that simply lags, unable to capture the same fascination without her, as she is the engine that drives the picture.  While she is as essential as Sonia Braga is to DOÑA FLOR, this film leaves plenty of unanswered questions and is likely to appeal only to the most ardent culinary followers or those devoted arthouse cinephiles who will be mesmerized by the hypnotic beauty in every frame, concluding with that lyrical Massenet piano theme, Méditation from the opera Thaïs, Meditation from Thaïs for piano (Andrew von Oeyen) filmed in ... YouTube (5:18).