Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) isn’t the first adaptation of Henry James’s novella 1903 The Beast in the Jungle. It’s not even the first one of 2023. That honour goes to Patric Chiha’s French-language movie The Beast in the Jungle, which made it to the screens about six months before Bonello’s.
Whether Bonello trimmed his sails having seen Chiha’s fascinating and underloved film is doubtful. The Beast looks like the vision of a man who’d already decided to take Henry James and put him through an extreme wash followed by a rigorous spin.
James’s story has lost its original shape in Bonello’s version, which flips the genders for a start, and casts Léa Seydoux as the “hero”, a strange creature so convinced that she’s going to suffer some unavoidable catastrophe in her life that she in effect pauses her entire existence and becomes an impassive presence alert to whatever it might be whenever it might come. And that – a very typical bit of Jamesian irony this – is precisely the catastrophe of her life. Bum tish.
So that’s the bones of the James story right here – impassive hero waiting for the catastrophe that she is in the process of bringing upon herself. In Chiha’s version, all the action was set in a nightclub, where we’d drop in now and again through the years to see how the hero’s wrestle with catastrophe was going. Bonello does it differently, setting the action in at least three different epochs, starting in a rather Jamesian 1910 before shunting forwards to 2044, where AI has taken over the world, and then balancing at a midway point in 2014.
In each Gabrielle (Seydoux) is problematically courted by Louis (George MacKay). In 2010 Louis is a mournful swell attempting to position himself between Gabrielle and her husband – much panting chastity here. In 2044 he is, like her, one of the many rendered unemployable by AI and trying to find gainful work while toying with the idea of “DNA purification”, supposedly a way of finding contentment. And in 2014 MacKay’s Louis is an incel fixated on Gabrielle and determined to do get revenge for the fact that he can’t get laid. We pause here for a second to ponder on MacKay – known in some circles as Georgeous George – not being able to find anyone who’ll have sex with him.
Though it is at that level also preposterous, MacKay is at his best as the incel, a role forcing him to break with the stateliness of his character in the other two timescapes. Seydoux remains stony throughout. The words “affect”, “affectless” and “affectlessness” turn up a lot, and she’s their embodiment.
Dolls recur as an idea. In 1910 Gabrielle’s husband manufactures them. In 2014 Gabrielle is an actress and model and – knocking on a bit – is tempted towards dollification by going under the cosmetic surgeon’s knife. By 2044 the dolls have taken over the world, to the point where Gabrielle is at one point consoled by an AI-driven doll (played by Saint Omer‘s Guslagie Malanda) and taken out to a nightclub called 1972, where everyone listens to music from the era.
Roy Orbison’s song Evergreen recurs also, one of Bonello’s nods to David Lynch, who seems to be one of the touchstones for the 2014 and 2044 sequences.
James recedes, Lynch advances and it becomes less an ironic tale of a wasted life and more one of love across time – MacKay as the unwavering Louis tempting Gabrielle to abandon her odd project – before shifting again into something like one of those lip-chewing Barbara Stanwyck movies where the endangered heroine is menaced by a stranger.
Shifting between internal and external, fantasy and reality, the dream state and the waking life, with some situations run through several times, to see if any variation is possible, it’s a world away from the languid decadence of Bonello’s most well known film to date, House of Tolerance, and closer to the nihilism of his Nocturama. At various points Bonello even suggests that nothing at all is at it seems here. The various eras may all be figments of Gabrielle’s hyper-stimulated imagination. What dark meat this movie is.
The Beast aka La Bête – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
