The Beast(5/12/2024)
I’m nothing if not brand loyal and as such there’s a pretty good chance that I never would have seen or even heard of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast had it not been distributed by Janus Films and as such received a whole bunch of promotion and shoutouts on that company’s Twitter feed. Honestly I wasn’t sure what to expect from it; I’m not that familiar with Bonello’s other work and the plot summaries I saw of it were pretty vague. As it turns out the film is kind of a work of science fiction which is set in the year 2044 but the main bit of futuristic technology in it is a machine that allows people to examine their past lives to expunge that baggage from their psyches… which is a concept that has something of a whiff of scientology to it, but hopefully that’s accidental. The main character’s main hangup is that she has a deep seeded feeling that one day, possibly at random she’ll be hit with some fatal disaster, which is stopping her from embracing life. That’s a concept that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” which is almost certainly something the film’s title is alluding to. In addition to the 2044 material we see two of the protagonists’ past lives and in all three stories we meet a woman played by Léa Seydoux and a man played by George MacKay: first we see them in the early 1900s (around the time of Henry James) in a sort of period melodrama involving a love triangle and then we see a story set around 2014 in which a version of MacKay a violent “incel” who’s stalking the Seydoux character. That later story is almost certainly inspired by the case of real life mass shooter Elliot Rodger which adds layers of dread to the proceedings but will likely cause some debate about the ethics of exploiting such tragedies.
Again, I’m not particularly familiar with Bonello, I think the only of his other films I’ve seen is his 2016 effort Nocturama. My memories of that film are a bit hazy but I don’t remember it having a whole lot in common with this. Watching this movie alone I’d say he seems like a guy who’s prone to wearing his influences on his sleeve to some extent. Parts of this movie, particularly the framing story, have clear shades of David Lynch and the 2014 segment is heavily indebted to Michael Haneke. The film feels a touch unbalanced in some ways as we don’t get quite enough of the framing story to really have it stand toe-to-toe with the past lives but only having two of those past lives feels a bit unwieldy. Three is kind of the magic number with these things and I feel like they could have maybe shortened those to make room for a third to really lock in the pattern. That second story in particular seems to go on way too long given that you basically know where it’s going from the jump, at least in broad terms if not specifics. There are clear motifs between all three stories and similar thematic throughlines but I’m not quite sure I understood the entire logic behind it all or how the past lives fully interact with the framing story. I also can’t say I was entirely impressed by the film’s overall look and feel, which seemed pretty straightforwardly digital and lacked the heft to really bring the film’s ambitions home. It’s kind of one of those movies that I can imagine seeing a video essay about at some point and maybe being won over a bit, but at present I’m not sure I really “get” this one and can’t say I was really won over by it.
**1/2 out of Five
Babes(5/27/2024)
I keep wanting to see mainstream comedy come back and it keeps kind of just not happening. Babes, a Neon release, wasn’t quite an attempt at the mainstream but it didn’t exactly feel like plucky indie either and that straddling of the two worlds may be part of why it hasn’t really caught on much. The film is largely a vehicle for Ilana Glazer, star of the Comedy Central sitcom “Broad City” and she’s more or less playing the same chaotic New York hipster role she established on that show. In the film she plays someone who becomes pregnant after a one night stand and learns that the father had actually died in a freak accident shortly after the consummation, leaving her to decide to have the baby despite not exactly being your typical maternal type. The whole set up feels a bit contrived to come up with a scenario in which the father doesn’t really enter into the equation for her decision making here but the movie is also a bit oddly disinterested in exploring why she wants this baby and also why she might not want to. Particularly conspicuous in its absence is any discussion of where this single woman living in New York on a Yoga instructor’s salary might not be able to afford another mouth to feed. Honestly I think the movie is perhaps looking at the wrong thing generally as it’s a movie about pregnancy when in reality I think I would have been a lot more interested in seeing how this immature character adjusts to motherhood than I am in seeing her go to ultrasounds and the other various Knocked Up motions. I’ll also say that I was a little disappointed in the direction here by Pamela Adlon, who was a lot more adventurous on her TV series “Better Things” than she is here, this feels a bit more conventional and straightforward. Having said all that, I don’t think this is a disaster by any means and I also need to concede that I’m absolutely not who this is targeted at. The movie is clearly meant to appeal to people who’ve had babies recently or know someone who has and are going to see all these various rituals of pregnancy being depicted and say “oh my god it’s so true” and I’m not really in that boat and the movie just wasn’t funny enough unto itself to bridge that gap.
**1/2 out of Five
The Movie Vampire 