Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/20/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 20, 2024

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux in The Beast

Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Jula Faure, Kester Lovelace, Felicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit, based on a story by Henry James. Cinematography: Josée Deshaies. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Anita Roth. Music: Anna Bonello, Bertrand Bonello.

Bertrand Bonello's The Beast is a jigsaw puzzle of a movie, asking the viewer to assemble the scattered pieces of three distinct stories -- a doomed romance set in early 20th-century Paris, a contemporary suspense thriller about stalker and prey, and a futuristic sci-fi tale about artificial intelligence -- into a single frame. The risk of such non-linear narratives is that the viewer may think that the finished product doesn't reward the effort of putting it all together. Each individual story in The Beast is enough to base an entire movie on. They share a common theme: the intersection of fear and desire. Is anything gained by jumbling them into one another? I think that Bonello knows the central fact about jigsaw puzzles: that the end result, the finished picture, is less important than the pleasure of putting the pieces together. He demonstrates this knowledge by opening his film with a distancing device: Léa Seydoux playing an actress in front of a green screen, being rehearsed through the movements -- a woman taking up a knife to defend herself from an unseen beast -- that will recur in some fashion throughout The Beast. It's a little like the picture on the cover of the puzzle box that helps you know what pieces are likely to go together. It's well-acted, with Seydoux and George MacKay deftly handling the switches between French and English, including the American accent called for in the thriller section, and Bonello achieves some creepy and suspenseful moments throughout. But in the end, I think its success depends mostly on the viewer's willingness to play his game.