When it comes to your full-on costume drama adaptations, Henry James is up there in the super-league alongside bankers like Dickens and Trollope, the Brontes and Tolstoy. I have to confess that he is one author with whom I have never properly come to grips on the printed page, though I have seen and enjoyed several films based on his work – which seems to have a rather attractive tendency to veer towards darkness, weirdness, and genre-adjacency.

Even so, I'm not entirely convinced that James, were he still with us today, would be entirely delighted to find himself credited as the originator of Bertrand Bonello's La Bête (Anglo title: The Beast). Parts of it certainly have an authentically Jamesian air about them (though you could almost as easily say they have the tone of something by Robert Chambers or Somerset Maugham), but – well, as I say, I'm not that familiar with the Henry James canon, but I'm fairly sure that unhinged incels ranting on the internet and people lying in vats of oil while robots operate on their brains are not a prominent feature of The Wings of the Dove or The Portrait of a Lady. But here they are, along with much other curious material.

Anyway: the film opens with Lea Seydoux (you know: the woman who domesticated James Bond) alone in front of a green-screen receiving instructions from an unseen director (Bonello himself, naturally). She seems to be involved in making some sort of suspense thriller, with an intruder in her house with her. Right on cue she spots her unwanted visitor and screams – and the screen dissolves into a swirl of different-coloured pixels.

Almost at once we find ourselves in Paris in 1910, where Seydoux is playing a brilliant and celebrated concert pianist who is in a comfortable but passionless marriage to a man who makes part of his fortune by producing dolls. Seydoux plays the piano and goes to all the right parties and gallery openings and, naturally because it's Lea Seydoux, looks fabulous doing so – and then she meets a young man named Louis (George MacKay) who suggests they have met before. In the course of their conversations Seydoux reveals she is plagued by a premonition, a sense of impending disaster which she fears will surely overtake her, despite all the efforts of the people around her to reassure her. (This premonition is the lurking 'beast' which gives the James source its title.)

I should mention that we are also spending time in 2044, in a bleak and rather dystopian world where the atmosphere is no longer breathable, the population seems to have dropped off significantly, and – hot button theme alert! – AI is basically running everything. In this reality Seydoux is stuck in a soul-crushingly dull and repetitive job, because the system has concluded that most humans can't be trusted to make important decisions objectively and consigned them to the most menial of duties. Her only hope of an escape is a procedure where people are operated upon so they experience hallucinations of past lives, allowing them to resolve their issues and shed all their emotional baggage. She is about to embark on this, and as she does so she meets Louis again (still MacKay), who is thinking about the same thing.

Most of the first half of the film is set in 20th century Paris, I should say, and there is very little explicit exposition to link the two realities: Seydoux and MacKay proceed with their very stately and chaste affair, with the odd scene of her visiting fortune-tellers and receiving odd prophecies about what is to come. Then this all comes to an end (said he, with deliberate vagueness), to be replaced by another scenario taking place in 2014 Los Angeles, with yet more incarnations of the two main characters. Are they fated to keep encountering each other, or is there a more explicable reason for their relationship across time and space?

So, a tough one to sum up, really. It's a little bit like Cloud Atlas but without the craziness, I suppose, though I suppose you could make a case for it being like Henry James' version of The Matrix, but without the kung fu. As I say, it only seems to me to be very oblique and loose adaptation of James' original story, which to me sounds to be bleakly ironic – the main character's fear of a looming catastrophe causes them to become a recluse and live an empty, loveless life, which of course turns out to be the catastrophe they were afraid of in the first place. It's not at all clear if this has any bearing on the film, which is about. . .

. . . well, I may have to get back to you on that one, for what the essential thesis of La Bête is is not at all clear to me. It certainly gives a strong impression of having definite aboutness, though the structure of the film, which has a significant degree of repetition in terms of settings, incidents, and images (birds, dolls, and knives all recur throughout the story), may be partly responsible for this. On a very basic level it is about feeling the desire for genuine human contact and the hazardous things people will do to achieve it; in a sense it is an SF film of the purest kind, in that it is an exploration of the question of what it really means to be human.

Nevertheless, even while I was watching it my train of thought was running thus: this is either a sophisticated and very intelligent film exploring big ideas in a way which isn't entirely on my frequency, or an enormous slice of pretentious old nonsense given an aura of quality by having a lot of money spent on it. I'm still not entirely sure. Another viewing would probably clear things up considerably, given I'd know from the start what was really going on, but do I really care enough to want to watch a 145 minute film again? (It would be even longer but – in a first, in my experience – the film eschews conventional credits in favour of those black-and-white square things which provides extra information to certain kinds of telephone.) The answer is probably not, which is really a point against it.

Still, I can't be all that negative about a film which is so boldly experimental in its form and style, and both the leads are very watchable. The shifts in tone are adroitly done – the Paris section looks and feels like a genuine costume drama, the future world could be that of a more conventional dystopian SF film, and the section in LA is an interesting deconstruction of dubious erotic thriller tropes, a genre it is depressingly successful at emulating.

You have to figure out the answers for yourself, but at least the questions are interesting and the story, to the extent that there is a coherent story, is an intriguing one. I'm not really familiar with Bonello's other work as a director (though apparently he has a small acting part in Titane, a film which makes La Bête look relatively conventional), but this one suggests a film-maker of some intelligence and skill. It's the kind of film you probably don't completely understand, but which you're glad you've seen anyway.

Also Showing. . .

. . . is Alice Rohrwacher's La chimera, which to some extent feels cut from very similar cloth. It-boy of the moment Josh O'Connor plays Arthur, an expat Englishman of antiquarian tendencies living in Tuscany in the 1980s. He has just come out of prison, something which he blames his friends for, having done a short stint for the illegal excavation and sale of historical artifacts. Tuscany is covered in ancient sites just waiting to be pillaged, and Arthur and his gang do their part – helped by the fact that Arthur has a borderline supernatural ability to sniff them out. When not doing this he seems conflicted, torn between the possibility of a new romance with a new acquaintance and his memories of a lost love.

This is a low-key but undeniably charming and engaging film, with a real sense of time and place and a winning (though understated) performance from O'Connor. The director's introduction I saw suggested that the film is designed not to look like it makes any sense at all on first viewing; only with time and thought can one perhaps make sense of what's happening. I wouldn't go that far, but the film's little ambiguities and mysteries are part of its appeal. I thought it could have done with its fantasy element being a little stronger and stranger, and I wouldn't be inclined to shower it with praise as fulsomely as many others have done, but it would be a very hard film to actively dislike.

Awix

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