Whether they’re pursuing each other through 1910, 2014 or 2044, there’s no real crackle of chemistry between the stars, which may well be by design. Laden with enticing ideas and images that never quite activate each other, “The Beast” instead coagulates into a thick 146-minute triptych of general, fidgeting malaise, and strands a hard-working Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a cross-time, cross-purposes relationship that keeps shape-shifting without getting us terribly involved. A first foray into science fiction for the filmmaker, it’s nonetheless of a piece with the formal itch and social unrest of his previous work, not least with the hyper-online techno-paranoia of last year’s lockdown feature “Coma.”īut it’s also a bit of a drag. It’s a typically heady brew from Bonello, fashioning the story as a tragic romance spun out across centuries, variously buffeted by the tragedies of natural disaster, toxic masculinity and technological takeover. Spare a thought for director Patric Chiha’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a Berlinale premiere earlier this year, with an already modest profile about to be dwarfed by Bertrand Bonello’s starrier, bigger-swinging “The Beast” - a gender-switched James riff in which said catastrophe is very much happening, hovering in the wings or dully in the past, depending on which of its three timelines you’re in. It feels glumly relevant in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence and other obvious but indefinite signals of human demise perhaps we should count this highly specific cinematic mini-trend as another. It does rather feel as if the universe - or at least the French film industry - is trying to tell us something when 2023 has turned up not one but two loose Gallic adaptations of Henry James’s “ The Beast in the Jungle.” That 1903 novella was about a man, John Marcher, who fails to fully live his life because he’s seized by premonitions of catastrophe that never visibly come to pass.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |