THE BEAST connected strongly with me and I recommend it to adventurous film lovers everywhere.
I wasn't sold on Bertrand Bonello until now. I'd passed over some of his stuff, and abandoned other movies he's directed midway into them just from exhaustion with his whole iconoclastic approach. This time, even though he's at his most freewheeling, it all works and it all pays off.
Bertrand Bonello and his stars bring the themes of Henry James' source material vividly alive with this picture. It's by no means a tidy unfolding, as nothing this director creates ever is, but it is unwieldy and eclectic in a way that builds out keen resonances for the audience. While we may rocket across epochs, juggling characters, shooting formats and story tones freely, we never lose sight of.what's on the line--which is no less than our unthinkable gall to surrender ourselves to love.
Lea Seydoux is a once-in-a-generation talent who commands the audience at every moment she's on screen, working within her typical economy but also a range not yet seen within a single feature. I completely lost myself in the exquisite beauty of what is, finally, pretty lonely suffering.
We all know that Seydoux can carry a picture, but it's George MacKay who really astounds in the second half of THE BEAST as he shifts personas from a hapless, hopeless romantic into a grimmer visage of loneliness.
The past comes alive in oddly quaint strokes, and the future stuff is nicely stripped down and to-the-point. Bonello sneaks from one thing to the next, ambling down the well-worn avenues but also taking the wrong corners in different genres--all within the same picture. I couldn't help but smile and recall our old buddy Nicholas Roeg.
The director and stars draw the audience through it all so resolutely--even elegantly--that by the time we reach our inevitable crescendo, it feels like something big, striking and important. So perfectly committed and weirdly balanced is its depictions of the human heart across time and territory that an internet clip of Korine-ian abjection sits at equal comfort alongside a stuffy aristocratic courtship. It's no fluke that gonzo neo-romantic Xavier Dolan punches in as co-producer here.
THE BEAST is a film that believes in "true love", not in some facile, precious way... but in that awestruck, abiding way that you feel when you encounter such a thing in real life. The palpable investment that its two leads ante up bolsters its power. Call it an instant classic of the least probable sort, and surely the best movie of this director's career. Has Leo Carax seen this??
