•Fear and memory are the real beasts in Bertrand Bonello’s La Bête-KIFF(Kolkata International Film Festival)•
Loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella, “The Beast in the Jungle,” where the main character John Marcher was seized with the belief that his life would be characterised by a catastrophic event that awaited for him, “La Bête” revolves around Gabrielle and Louis, who, like star-crossed lovers, travel across space and time over three specific timelines around which the film is structured: 1910, 2014, and 2044.
The film opens in 2014 when Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), a model based in Los Angeles, auditions for a horror film where she has to react in fright to a threat that doesn’t exist, which forms the basis of the film. The narrative then quickly shifts to 2044, a futuristic dystopian world dominated by AI where emotions are discarded as excess desires. As an inhabitant of the future, Gabrielle has to purge off her emotions in order to fit in with society and get a job.
She therefore decides to purify her DNA with a machine that will plunge her into her past lives and rid her of all strong feelings. The audience, along with Gabrielle, is then transported on a surreal journey of remembrance with a blend of sci-fi. The narrative is suddenly traced back to 1910, the era of the Seine flood, where Gabrielle is a Parisian musician who runs a doll factory with her husband.
She meets Louis (George MacKay) in both 1910 and 2014. In 1910, Louis is a mysterious man whom Gabrielle meets at a party and remembers meeting him before, where they enjoyed a soprano together. They eventually fall in love but can never be together due to Gabrielle’s premonition about a beast that would befall them, while Louis always insisted on protecting her from the beast, whereas in 2014, Louis is a sociopath who stalks Gabrielle around the glass mansion she’s house-sitting in and instead of protecting her rather harms her in a fatal manner.
The three narratives constantly overlap throughout the film and at times get confusing, but Bonello’s aim is to establish this chaos that has plagued modernity. The film is a stark commentary on the technologically driven world where human emotions have been replaced with machines and humans are reduced to beasts, as evident in the character transition of Louis. However, the film also explores how with modernity comes loneliness, where technology has detached the people of the world from each other by luring and absorbing them into it.
Louis of 2014 is clearly a victim of this phenomenon, where he is utterly lonely and therefore vents out all his frustration by recording videos and posting them on his social media handles. This pyschosis ultimately leads him to commit the atrocious crime of killing Gabrielle because of his immense hatred for his opposite gender. The next scene cuts to Louis standing beside a pool of blood where Gabrielle’s corpse afloats; he shows no guilt or remorse and stands like an automaton resembling a monster, a byproduct of this mechanised world.
Fear and memory are always deeply ingrained, and Bonello portrayed them through Gabrielle. It’s Gabrielle’s fear and the memory of the fear that she carries with her across decades that keep her and Louis from uniting every time they cross each other’s paths. Though the cause behind the fear is the catastrophe—in 1910, the Seine flood, and in the 2014s, it’s the repressed humanity in modernity—the ultimate catastrophe is Gabrielle’s inability to commit and live in the moment, vesting all her faith in her predestination rather than exercising her free will, which led to her downfall. In 2044, revisting her memory, she relives the same fear, and therefore the experiment fails. Bertrand Bonello shows that when it comes to emotions, science has to fail.
The doll and the pigeon, which are recurrent tropes in the film, can be seen as metaphors of death, the fluidity of time, the growing influence of AI, and the disorientation that comes with too much dependence on technology. However, at the heart of the film is the tragic love story of two people who are caught in an endless loop of unattainable love.
Fear and death go hand in hand throughout the film; in all the time periods, fear only results in the worst possible outcome; in 1910, Gabrielle’s fear results in the deaths of both Louis and Gabrielle; in 2014, her fear results in her own death at the hands of Louis; and in 2044, her memory of fear makes her a misfit in her society at the end.
In Bertrand Bonello’s world, fear and memory are the real beasts—the fear that keeps one away from expressing themselves and the memory of fear that keeps one rooted to their past trauma. Throughout the film, there is a constant interplay between the past, present, and future, only to signify in the end that the past is inescapable and shapes both the present and future in some way.
Though it’s an immensely complicated and multilayered film, it can be also seen as Bertrand Bonello’s brilliant study of the semiotics of emotions in his experimental film. Due to excessive jump cuts, the film offers no catharsis to the audience but offers a major takeaway to the audience- i.e. Carpe Diem in its own implicit and complex way.
Srilekha Mitra