Photo: Sideshow/Janus Films

The Beast/La Bête

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bertrand Bonello

In the past five years or so, at least two of the greatest films have also provided their own radical versions of adaptation. Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) left the events of Anna Seghers’s novel mostly intact, but augmented its concerns through both image and word, deliberately obfuscating the time period in which the film is set and adding a discordant narration that reflects back on the nature of storytelling in times of immense crisis. Even more boldly, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car (2021) drastically expanded Murakami Haruki’s short story, using disparate elements not only from the author’s body of work but also Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya to create an all-encompassing meditation on artistic creation and the strife and potential healing within relationships. 2023 also saw a surfeit of unconventional adaptations, with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things all zeroing in on one aspect of their sources or shifting their focal points, all to fascinating if not entirely successful ends.

But the greatest adaptation to premiere last year came from an unlikely source: Bertrand Bonello. Despite his palpable interest in inspirations both historical—Saint Laurent, Zombi Child—and mythical—Tiresia—his latest magnum opus, The Beast, is his first work of explicit adaptation, with the screenplay credited to himself in collaboration with Benjamin Charbit and Guillaume Bréaud, “freely inspired” by Henry James’s legendary 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. “Freely” is even perhaps pushing it: it is almost an impudent work of adaptation, spooling out James’s story of devastating melancholy between an Englishman anticipating a sudden catastrophic event and the woman who agrees to keep watch with him into a tripartite tale of thwarted connection across the ages. In 1910 Paris, on the eve of the Great Flood, concert pianist Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Englishman Louis (George MacKay) reconnect over her premonition; in 2014 Los Angeles, aspiring actress Gabrielle is stalked by Louis, now an American incel; and in 2044 Paris, Gabrielle meets Louis while deciding whether to undergo an AI-recommended procedure to “cleanse” her DNA by reliving her past lives to purge her emotions.

Making the appearance of The Beast all the stranger is the existence another 2023 adaptation: Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle is a putatively more faithful reworking of James, retaining the original story’s names and tracking their interactions over the course of 25 years (beginning in 1979) in a Parisian nightclub. The differences are instructive, despite both directors’ entrancing focus on mood and texture. Chiha sticks close (but not entirely) to the letter of the novella: the outlines are the same, especially with the climactic scenes, and yet the tangents open up the hermetically sealed emotions of James’s characters. Numerous signposts are given, most of all the specter of AIDS which devastates the openly queer nightclub’s population, and the seemingly virginal James protagonists are swapped in for people with relationships of varying levels of success and intimacy.

For his part, Bonello plays with such expectations of fidelity from his first image: Seydoux in a green-screen studio (in what the viewer will later learn is her 2014 guise), taking off-screen directions from Bonello himself, as she performs actions of a woman in trouble, before her image and screen bleeds into a digitally artifacted blur that serves as the title card. The film then moves into the 1910 section, which recreates the first chapter of James’s novella to a T; immediately afterwards, the 2044 thread is introduced, and little after that is directly retained from James. The 1910 and 2014 sections play out over their respective halves of the film (only one shot from 2014 is intermingled with its predecessor), with the 2044 setting interspersed at unexpected intervals, a decision which, rather than deemphasizing futuristic speculation in favor of twinned tragic tales, explicitly casts the future as an inherently ethereal, inexplicable realm woven into our collective past and present, all the more vivid for its eerily quiet Paris, empty of cars and computer screens but always full of a certain menace.

Bonello’s never been shy about divulging his influences, and it’s easy to further extrapolate potential precedents for The Beast. There is of course Brian De Palma, whose self-casting in The Black Dahlia as a sleazy Hollywood director mirrors Bonello’s voice in the prologue. Of all people, Jia Zhangke seems to have made an impression with his two recent tripartite films, both of which bear a resemblance: Mountains May Depart with its past/present/near-future set-up (though the use of 4:3 is applied here to the future), and Ash Is Purest White in the use of past time periods to in effect revisit past works, with 1910 corresponding somewhat closely to House of Tolerance and 2014 to Nocturama. But while that latter film was equally indebted to Dawn of the Dead and Alan Clarke’s Elephant, and parts of Zombi Child are in conversation with I Walked With a Zombie, The Beast shares its clearest touchstone with its predecessor—filmed during a year-long delay in production—Coma: David Lynch. Paradoxically, the eighty-minute Coma feels closer to Inland Empire‘s complete dislocation, while the two-hour-and-forty-minute The Beast shares its own DNA primarily with Mulholland Dr., embracing the seductive Hollywood textures even as darkness rapidly approaches; even considering changing cultural preferences, Seydoux’s noticeably shorter hairstyle here compared to the other two sections suggests a kinship with Naomi Watts in Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, as does her status as a woman staying in a residence not her own while trying to break into the industry. The extremely prominent use of Roy Orbison’s “Evergreen” only drives home the connection.

Bonello’s process for adaptation, like his proclivity towards inspiration, seems to be one of unique, discerning absorption, open to pulling from the unlikeliest of sources and repurposing them for his own uses. The boldest of these, of course, is the mass shooter Elliot Rodger, who killed six people at the University of California, Santa Barbara 2014 in a misogynist rage. Bonello intersperses recreations of several of his manifesto videos featuring Louis throughout Gabrielle’s 2014 narrative, and his fascination with the clear means of address that lay bare hatred and insecurity turns the first section’s tentative, repressed duet into a series of indecisive point/iron-willed counterpoint. In turn, the pronounced inequality in the span of years between the three time periods suggests a fracture in connections exacerbated by the events of this middle section, an acceleration towards oblivion.

There is too much contained in The Beast to even begin to encapsulate. For one, it’s still difficult to watch this film and MacKay’s brilliant, watchful performance without picturing how Gaspard Ulliel, a longtime Bonello collaborator originally cast in the part before the production delay and his untimely death in a skiing accident, would have played the part; on the other hand, the shifting identity and personality of Louis in relation to Gabrielle’s steady, tremulous presence is only enhanced by having a non-French actor assume these different forms. There’s also of course the sheer pleasure of watching Bonello shoot in Los Angeles (even catching a glimpse of a taco truck at one point), a mood consonant with yet distinct from his unrivaled work with Paris at night. Even the casting of three of the only significant characters besides the main duo bears mentioning: Guslagie Malanda from Saint Omer as an android in 2044; filmmaker and Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova as a model friend of Gabrielle in 2014; and producer Xavier Dolan as the voice of the AI guiding Gabrielle in 2044. These three oddly discordant choices, each seeming to represent entirely different strands of film culture, feel in line with Gabrielle’s computer in 2014 constantly contending with real-world events and online detritus that, taken together, form something genuinely unnerving: news coverage of the Ferguson uprising literally backgrounded, pop-up ads featuring a prescient description of a Trump presidency and promises of Kim Kardashian nudes, even some clips from Trash Humpers.

The general cacophony suggested by this hailstorm of information, however, does not truly describe the experience of The Beast, and how both Bonello and Seydoux contribute to the singular, overwhelming mood. Seydoux has been on one of the great acting runs of the twenty-first century, turning out what would conceivably be career-best work for anyone else in three consecutive years between France (2021), One Fine Morning (2022), and now this film; like in the former, so much power is derived from the shifting landscape that is Seydoux’s face, the terror, pleasure, and confusion that she vividly displays. Across the three parts united under Bonello’s implacable camera and alternately lush and cold surfaces, various motifs recur both within—most notably a nightclub in 2044 that is patterned at various times after the music and decor of 1972, 1980, and 1963—and across different parts: dolls (suggestively made out of celluloid in the 35mm-shot first part), shared musical pieces, psychics, and incongruously pigeons as a harbinger of death. What this all adds up to is something inexplicable, completely breaking from the letter of James but totally in line with the horrifyingly sad spirit: that when the final hammer blow comes, it will be in the most impossible of ways; that one life is not enough to contain the devastation that a single person will feel.