Chamber play dystopia: “The Beast”: In DNA purification

No matter what Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) do, their mutual desire and romantic longing never turns into a love affair. Instead, all of their encounters end in disaster. And that despite the fact that in the arthouse science fiction film “The Beast” they actually meet on three different time levels. Bertrand Bonello’s extraordinary film, which was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2023 and is now finally coming to German cinemas, is anything but a classic love film. It’s primarily about Gabrielle’s deep-seated fear of an unspecified catastrophe. This means that the film has its finger on the pulse of time in times of ongoing and overlapping crises. The story is loosely based on Henry James’ novella “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), which is currently enjoying great popularity as an inspiration for cinema. In recent years it has been implemented several times on film, including by Patric Chiha in the film “The Animal in the Jungle,” which was shown at the Berlinale in 2023.

“The Beast” tells of Gabrielle, who undergoes a procedure to purify her DNA in the year 2044. In this future, artificial intelligence rules. Because of their uncontrollable emotions and affects, people are hardly employed anymore, so there is an unemployment rate of 67 percent. In order to be able to do something other than stupidly measure the temperature of circuits, Gabrielle, despite her concerns, undertakes the DNA purification procedure in order to get her feelings under control and be approved by the AI ​​for another activity . Young Louis is also supposed to undergo this procedure and has no less doubts than Gabrielle. During the treatment, a bath in a black-oily mass, Gabrielle travels into different states of consciousness of people from the past and experiences intense moments full of feelings and fears. On the one hand, she becomes the pianist Gabrielle, who lives in Paris in 1910 shortly before the great flood, is married to a doll manufacturer and meets the young Louis, who adores her but with whom she does not get involved in a relationship. On the other hand, she suddenly finds herself in Los Angeles in 2014, where she is an unsuccessful actress and model guarding the villa of rich people and meets the violent incel Louis after an earthquake.

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Losing yourself in an obsessive desire and ultimately not being able to live it out becomes a frightening threat, especially in the case of the young Incel (Involuntary Celibate), who is involuntarily celibate without a sexual relationship, as his obsession turns into outright violence. In 2014, Louis stalks Gabrielle and follows her after the not so strong earthquake, which briefly causes a state of emergency, like in a horror film in the lonely villa. The titular beast, which always lurks in secret and suddenly becomes real in the storyline at the beginning of the 20th century in the form of a factory fire and a historically real flooding of Paris, runs as a common thread through this film. In the end there is a dramatic escalation. The plot jumps wildly through time. She creates a bourgeois Paris of the early 20th century in slow images, then moves to a Los Angeles of the early 21st century, where Gabrielle lives in a villa, but ultimately under precarious circumstances. In the Paris of the future there are hardly any people on the streets anymore, everyone wears gas masks. The interiors are cold and minimalist when Gabrielle isn’t going to a club where music and fashion from different decades are constantly changing, sometimes in the soulful 70s style, sometimes referencing the wild post-punk of the noughties.

Although labeled as science fiction, “The Beast” is not a standard genre film, but a stylized, chamber play-like drama that thrives primarily on Léa Seydoux’s haunting performance. Over the course of three centuries, the actress expresses the deep-seated fear of a terrible event, which sometimes turns into sheer panic, extremely convincingly. While at the beginning of the 20th century the great concern about getting involved in a romantic relationship was still a practice of bourgeois self-control, the encounters of Gabrielle and Louis in the 21st century ultimately become political disputes. The anti-feminist violence of the incel can be read as an allegory for global right-wing mobilization. The skepticism of the two young people who desire each other in the dystopian future of 2044 to undergo a purification of their DNA is an existential struggle for self-assertion.

»The Beast«: France/Canada 2023. Director: Bertrand Bonello. Book: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit. With: Léa Seydoux, George McKay, Guslagie Malanda, Elina Löwensohn, Dasha Nekrasova and others in cinemas from October 10th.

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