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.  

Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2016)

Cast: Finnegan Oldfield, Vincent Rottiers, Hamza Meziani, Manai Issa, Martin Petit-Guyot, Jamil McCraven, Raban Nait Oufella, Laure Valentinelli, Ilias le Dore, Robin Goldbronn, Luis Rego, Hermine Karagheuz, Adèle Haenel. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello. Cinematography: Léo Hinstin. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Fabrice Rouaud. Music: Bertrand Bonello.

Nocturama is a kind of existential thriller in which a group of young people bomb and burn various Parisian landmarks. I use the word "existential" because their terrorism appears to be unmotivated; it's an acte gratuit that seems to stem from no political or social dissatisfaction. The narrative is elliptical: We watch the members of the group as they cross Paris to assemble at their various assigned targets before we even know where they're going and why. Eventually, there's a flashback that shows their preparatory meeting, but even that supplies only the most rudimentary information: that the explosive is semtex, which has been procured for them an older man named Greg (Vincent Rottiers). Their several missions accomplished, they regroup in a department store that's closed for the night, where they raid the food and wine department, try on the clothes, listen to music, and watch the news, which eventually reveals that their hideout has been discovered. Two of them are missing: One is killed in a showdown with a security guard, while Greg suffers a fate that we learn about in a curious way. The outcome is presented with a cold-blooded detachment. Bertrand Bonello breaks no new ground for the thriller genre, but skillfully plays with the viewer's reactions to the young protagonists, an alternation of censure and sympathy.   

House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

 

Cast: Noémie Lvovsky, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Jasmine Trinca, Adèle Haenel, Alice Barnole, Iliana Zabeth, Xavier Beauvois, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Jacques Nolot. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello. Cinematography: Josée Deshais. Production design: Alain Guffroy. Music: Bertrand Bonello.