Until It’s Too Late: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast

Not adapted so much as vertiginously extrapolated from a Henry James novella, Bertrand Bonello’s audacious “The Beast” is a hypnotic and destabilizing vision of a past, present, and future in which two star-crossed lovers struggle to connect in the face of their own fears, as the engulfing threat of unknown catastrophes—both individual and collective—subjugates their tremulous, ever-fluctuating romance to a state of perpetual dread.  In James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” an 80-page short story from 1903, a man spends his life alone, paralyzed by the conviction that something terrible awaits him, a beast certain to pounce at any moment, only to realize too late that the beast was his own fear. Cross-cutting between three time periods, Bonello’s vividly unsettling film (now in theaters) transposes Jamesian themes to the realm of genre pastiche, threading together period drama with suspense thriller, metaphysical horror, and insidiously blanched sci-fi futurism to weave a temporally boundless tapestry of desire, fear, and disquiet—of humanity at its most passionate and alive.   In each of its settings—belle-epoque Paris, on the eve of its great 1910 flood; Los Angeles, in 2014; and Paris in 2044, in an aseptic dystopia ruled by artificial intelligence—two characters recur, souls fated (or doomed) to circle one another in successive lifetimes. In 1910, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a celebrated pianist who confides in her handsome suitor, Louis (George MacKay, in a role originally intended for the late Gaspard Ulliel), the sense of impending doom that’s been with her all her life, which Louis claims he shares. In 2014, Gabrielle is an actress housesitting in Los Angeles, where Louis—an angry incel whose hateful, self-aggrandizing video rants are lifted verbatim from the chilling manifestos uploaded by the American spree killer Elliott Rodger before his rampage in Isla Vista—begins to stalk her. And in 2044, Gabrielle contemplates a new procedure to “purify” her DNA and erase her emotions, a prospect that fills her and a chance acquaintance, Louis, with a profound terror. In each setting, Bonello unearths what he describes as a “history of feelings,” depicting how people can express, repress, and suppress their emotions, as well as how the social, political, spiritual, and technological shifts that overwhelm and entrap his characters can also work to drive out their humanity. This is a frequent preoccupation for Bonello, a French director whose past films—the opiated “House of Tolerance,” set in a bordello in fin-de-siècle Paris; decadent biopic “Saint Laurent,” starring Ulliel as the fashion designer; “Nocturama,” a dreamlike vision of young radicals in Paris who retreat to a shopping mall after committing a terrorist attack, only to be ideologically undone by its consumerist excess; “Zombi Child,” in which the ghost of colonialism rears its head at a modern-day French boarding school; and “Coma,” a surreal descent into the dreams and reality of a teenager locked in her bedroom—have manipulated time and space to reflect the relative freedom or confinement of characters within the larger, unknowable cross-currents of cultural context and histories.  Speaking with RogerEbert.com over Zoom from the Criterion offices in midtown New York, Bonello discussed the uncanny distortions of self that recur in his work, operating in three different time periods, and the timeless allure of Léa Seydoux. This interview has been edited and condensed. The last time we spoke, at the 2019 New York Film Festival, was for an interview about “Zombi Child” and its place within your body of work. You described the film as embodying the “cinema of fear,” both formally and narratively, in how it allowed you to express your own anxieties and fears of the world. The two films you’ve made since, “Coma” and “The Beast,” belong to the cinema of fear as well, so I’m curious how your perception of that concept has evolved over the past few years. In a way, they do belong to the cinema of fear. They’re not proper genre movies, but they include genre elements that allow me to talk about my fears but also express political thoughts. For example, “The Beast” is the first time I’ve used science fiction and set something in the future, but I realized that, when you invent and create concepts of the future, it’s also a way of talking about your fear of the present. I had this concept that, in the future, humanity has f—ed everything up, and AI took power and solved everything, and the price has been expensive to pay. It’s the future you see. All my fears of relationships are in there as well. Of course, that can be the fear we all know, of everything happening around us. We don’t know where it’s going to stop or where it’s going to drive us. But it’s also more about personal fears. How do you belong to this world? How do you navigate the relationship between technology and humanity, something that’s been very strong across the last 20 years but is now str