Luis Martínez Madrid
Madrid
Updated Wednesday, March 27, 2024-21:29
Criticism Death as a consumer good
Premiere 'Qui Je suis' is released, an unpublished Pasolini by the first Bertrand Bonello
Venice Film Festival 4 prodigious enigmas in Venice: 'Holly', 'The Beast', 'The Bastard (The Promised Land)' and 'The Theory of Everything'
The future is basically a thing very much of the past. So many times literature or cinema itself have imagined the forms that life will have when life is no longer the known life that there is no longer a way to distinguish what will happen from what has passed, what is happening from what never happened. Bertrand Bonello, an author who is difficult to capture in one definition, always committed to a multiplex and transgender cinema, is convinced of this and is so convinced that his latest film,
The beast,
imagines the life of a couple in three stages. different (in 1910, in 2024 today and in 2044), but as if not.
In all three cases, the fear of love is the same, loneliness remains exactly the same and desolation occupies everything.
It sounds pessimistic and, in fact, it is. “I understand,” the director himself begins to perhaps temper the confusion, “that the task of cinema is not so much to offer speeches as to raise problems and concerns. As Godard said, what interests me is not making political or social films, but making films politically. There is a difference between the two things and it is important.
The beast
is a film that is happy in the perplexity in which it unfolds. Based not so distantly on Henry James' story
The Beast in the Jungle,
the film lives in the same tenacity, which is also uncertainty, of the text that it adapts in its own way: the need to truly commit to love and drive. selfish and elusive that escapes that commitment. «Actually, it all boils down to fear.
The fear of love is a constant that runs through us.
In the book, the main character lives pending a kind of premonition. Something is going to happen, but he doesn't know what. And that keeps him paralyzed," explains the director, who takes a second and continues: "But it is not advisable to demonize fear. Biologically, it is very useful.
It is fear, the warning of the hidden, that keeps us alive.
It is a very beautiful feeling that has to do with uncertainty and states of alert. Fear forces us to look at the reality around us and ask ourselves about it, since it threatens us. The negative part is that too much immobilizes us.
The explanation is worth trying out a first definition of the film itself. In its own way, it is a horror film.
The beast,
in fact, unfolds on the majestic screen like a hypnosis session, like a fantastic fairy tale that is actually provocation and dream. The beginning of the story, between dystopia and fever, is the grief of a woman
(Léa Seydoux)
willing to erase from herself and from her DNA all traces of emotion. We are in the future. A classic of becoming perfect. The delicate process will put you in touch with your past lives. With them and with a recurring love
(George MacKay)
that reappears sometimes as a gift and other times as a punishment. The director turns the texture of the film into the setting that is both recognizable and perfectly strange for a nightmare without time, without past, without present and perhaps without future. And from there, Bonello builds a labyrinth-shaped story as obsessive and delirious as it is magnetic.
«What I propose will happen to us, in reality, is happening to us. That's always the game of science fiction. I imagine in the movie that Artificial Intelligence has completely triumphed. We are not that far from it. We live in a society in which narcissism dominates everything and has done so to the point of turning emotions into dangerous ones. Deleting them could be the solution or so the society of 2044 in which the characters live believes. It is as if the machine has ended up solving something that the human ego is incapable of. The next thing is to wonder what kind of world that would be.
The paradox is living in a world without fear, but at the same time in which you feel less alive.
"Live better, without fear, but feel worse," she comments in the same tone between enigma and perplexity in which all of his work navigates.
Bonello says that he is convinced that fear and love are two feelings that combine well.
"The first interest of the film was to instill terror in a romantic film very close to melodrama,"
he says and explains: "Horror cinema was what made me a filmmaker. As a teenager I watched films by Carpenter, Romero and Dario Argento. It was the time of video stores. In them I recognized the importance of atmosphere over scares. It was a way to channel other fears such as, for example, the Vietnam War or the terrorism of the Red Brigades or other more intimate fears such as those that appear in Cronenberg's films. All these films offer a vision of the world.
Be that as it may, the real fear is always loneliness. And as such it passes through each frame of the tape. At the beginning of the 20th century, she is the one left alone after abandoning him. And in the 21st century, which represents our present, it is he who appears only transfigured and inspired by the real figure of INCEL (acronym for the English expression for involuntary celibacy) Elliot Rodger, the murderer of eight people after recording on video that The reason for the massacre was none other than the "desire to punish women for rejecting him." «What you see in the film is literally a cut and paste of Rodger's videos. When I saw them I was fascinated, not by the slaughter obviously, but by the completeness without guilt. There was an amazing calm in the way he said:
'The girls don't love me, that's why I hate them, that's why I'm going to kill them.'
In some ways, the act of recording a video before committing such a crime is the ultimate expression of technology's relationship with loneliness. What is insisted and repeated that we live in an interconnected world, but completely isolated from each other, in this case does not allow for a reply. It is as if technology has become the new and only true religion standing,” the director concludes punctually. And he does it in a present that suddenly seems too much like the past. And even to the future.