The Past is Prologue

Bertrand Bonello may finally be cementing a stature as one of the best directors in the world. While he’s found an acclaim before with House of Tolerance and Nocturama that had some already declare him so canonical, the polymathic Frenchman’s 10th narrative feature, The Beast, has finally put it all together.

While Bonello’s cinema is clinical by design, consumed with the way the two dimensional modern image recycles and imitates itself within otherwise blank subjects, the natural coldness of films populated with philosophical (and, in 2019’s Zombi Child, more literal) zombies has at times rendered his work more theoretical and slight than would fulfill the Drama of that genre they occupy. With The Beast ‘s soul scraping sci fi conceit, his emotion is less abstract than ever. Even as he builds a powerful empathy in narrative, his images are always more concerned with the insufficiency of human, and camera eye, perception thereof.

In the year 2044, AI has invented a process by which a person “purify their DNA” by revisiting their past lives in order to diminish their emotional capacity and please the robot overlords (voiced, in a devious casting neg, by failed melodramatist Xavier Dolan) enough that they may find employment. Physically, it involves a tar bath and ear needle; mentally it seems to involve compounding every deadly trauma into a fourth-dimensional ego death. Lea Seydoux‘s Gabrielle, an underemployed anxious depressive, finds herself in a frame narrative dilemma about the treatment, as well as an artist of depreciating talents in her deadly pasts.

The idea of a “past life” instinctually seems as if it should explain something about our mysterious own identities. Perhaps one feels a certain way because a past self, who is essentially a different person, put the notion into us, and we can throw our hands up and defer our flaws and anxieties comfortably to them. The Beast challenges this with a dialectic of the dramatic irony of its The Fountain-like triptych-of-eras structure and Gabrielle’s recurring sense of impending doom. Whether an 1800s Pianist, a 2014 low-profile actress-model, or the obsolete future low-skilled victim of the AI that may replace most human professions, her own fear of the future alienates her. Even as the film suggests an eternal return that would render that terror absurd, its central premise suggests an end of history that may validate the fear. 

While Gabrielle seeks apathy via spiritual surgery, Bonello, in his objective, indifferent images, feels like he’s trying to carve a path straight through nihilism. Whether in the reflexive exploration of ambient capitalist propaganda in Nocturama’s hypocritical radicals or the gilded and objectivized House of Tolerance prostitutes, the inherent lack of understanding between the minds of visual creatures premises each shot of his career; always interrogating the line between observing and understanding.

In The Beast, frames are clean, but their subjects aren’t where they’re supposed to be in order to “perfect” them. This, along with a freewheeling, dislocating structure, bolsters the theme and feeling of undesired, unfulfilling providence. The relationship of the image to its subjects’ internality finds a literal symbol in a late scene of Gabrielle viewing her past lives end onscreen, sobbing as the AI chides her for doing so. It’s like a direct challenge to Roger Ebert’s assertion that movies are “empathy machines”. Seeing doesn’t necessarily mean feeling, and we’re doing an awful lot of empty seeing these days. 

On that note, one of The Beast ‘s most radical experimentations with the “neutral gaze” comes in the “present day’s” manifestation of its co-lead, Gabrielle’s through-the-ages soulmate Louis (George MacKay) as a literal incarnation of Elliot Rodger. Bonello has him recite Rodger’s vlogs verbatim and stalk Gabrielle, but the fact we’ve seen him as an actual “gentleman” in the past gives the (fulfilled) expectation of a less violent collision of their paths, one in which they may swap the role of savior.

Between Nocturama’s criticism of activism and The Beast ‘s casting of cult Red Scare Podcast provocateur Dasha Nekrasova, it’s clear Bonello’s ideology (or lack thereof) allows the tortured icon of Rodger to fascinate rather than merely repulse him. He’s a rich symbol for the alienation Bonello interrogates, and the artsier flourishes of Louis’ vlogs, shot with iPhone imprecision and spliced nonchalantly into the “truer” film, challenge that neutral gaze via death of the author. Still, even with the prevailingly ambivalent tone, empathy for Elliot, and conspicuous use of repetious editing, this “middle segment” is truly thrilling material, signalling an ability to engineer base, sub-analytical appeal that had arguably eluded Bonello in prior works. It’s truly straight out of De Palma. 

Despite the “direct cinema” impartiality that the director grants to to Gabrielle’s technological self reflection, she finds it difficult to be so coldly objective about herself. The horror of The Beast is the idea that a connection once so romantic, as in Gabrielle and Louis’ past, could with technology’s mediation become so automated; a dystopia equal parts Soderbergh and Bresson. Even as we get deeper inside of Gabrielle than even her own understanding permits, she remains a cipher for forces that flow through her, forces that, like an antidepressant, now include technology.