08/06/24

Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh

Some films almost defy logical analysis and Bertrand Bonello’s La Bête is one such er… beast, depicting as it does three distinct time-strands, each one featuring different versions of the same two characters. We first meet Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) in a green-screen room, where the film’s director is talking her through a scene where she must pick up a knife from a kitchen table. This instantly alerts the audience to the fact that what we are about to see is an elaborate construct.

The story begins in 2044, where AI has pretty much taken over everyone’s lives, leaving them with precious little to do. Gabrielle is struggling to come to terms with a thankless job, which requires her to put her hand on a glass screen every so often. She decides to undergo ‘purification’, a procedure which will remove all of her troublesome human emotions. Meanwhile, she is offered the companionship of a doll, Poupée Kelly (Guslagie Malanda), who will do anything that Gabrielle asks of her.

As the purification begins events flash back to Paris in the year 1910, where Gabrielle meets Louis (George McKay) at a society party. In this version of her life, Gabrielle is a talented musician and she’s happily married to Georges (Martin Scali), a doll-maker, but her chance encounter with Louis clearly strikes a significant chord with both of them.

Have they already met somewhere else? Gabrielle confides to Louis that for most of her life she has lived with the fear that something terrible is going to happen to her. And just when that’s starting to sink in, we flash forward again to the year 2014, where Gabrielle is trying to make a living as a model and Louis is a terrifying incel, spewing hatred onto social media, intent on destroying all those women who have so callously spurned him over the years…

Bonello’s film is the very definition of a slow-burner, a whole series of events and repetitions gradually building to relate a mystifying narrative. Gina (Marta Hoskins), a blank-eyed clairvoyant, keeps popping up to put an even more disturbing spin on what’s happening. If I claimed to absolutely understand everything that happens in the film’s two hours and twenty-six minutes, I’d be exaggerating. I’m also unsure if a climactic scene, which appears to echo David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, is an intentional homage or just a coincidence.

Whatever, as the story moves assuredly through its many (often startling) twists and turns, I find myself increasingly fascinated with what I’m watching. Seydoux is fabulous in all of her versions and McKay (who took over the role of Louis at very short notice – and also learned to speak French into the bargain) continues to be a chameleon, seemingly able to transform himself into whatever is asked of him.

La Bête arrives heavily laden with five-star reviews and, though I’m not quite in that camp, I do feel this is a bold, ambitious film that goes to places where few others have dared to tread. I also readily accept that it won’t be for everyone.

Please note, in place of the usual rolling credits, viewers are offered the opportunity to scan a QR code instead, something I did for the purposes of this review. I urge everyone to do the same, only because there’s also a short clip on there that offers yet another piece to this enigmatic puzzle of a film.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney