Though Bertrand Bonello only borrows part of the title and the basic dramatic premise of Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which many literary experts believe the author was describing his own personal fear of intimacy, it’s impossible not to keep thinking of James’ story as Bonello’s two-and-a-half hour fantasy unfolds since anyone who has read it will be constantly on the lookout for the titular, metaphorical monster the protagonist thinks will someday lay him low with tragic finality. The director has even switched up the gender, turning James’ John Marcher into three French women named Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux), each of whom inhabits a separate era in time. The earliest coincides most closely with James’, Paris in 1910, when the French capital was visited by a catastrophic flood. Is this natural disaster the “beast” that will bring down Gabrielle? In the first scene, during a visit to an art salon with her husband, Georges (Martin Scali), an industrial dollmaker, Gabrielle is approached by a man named Louis (George MacKay), who says he met her some years earlier in Italy where she, unprompted, told him of her lifelong fear of unspecified doom. Apparently, it is a secret she has shared with no one else, not even Georges. The secret makes these two co-conspirators and would-be lovers in the mind of the viewer as they continue to meet clandestinely until the flood tears their world apart.

Bonello intersperses episodes of Gabrielle and Louis meeting with scenes from 2044, where Paris and, presumably, the world is now inundated by AI, which has rendered most of humanity its servants. Here Gabrielle is trying to secure a better sort of job, but needs to undergo a “purifying” process wherein she is cleansed of her emotional detritus so as to make her a more efficient worker according to the machine logic of her digital overlords. Bonello plays up the irony of this socioeconomic milieu rather than its inherent terror, and reintroduces another incarnation of Louis, who is undergoing a similar process in order to get a civil servant job. Like their namesakes in 1910, these two play out a nascently erotic game shaped by Gabrielle’s still incipient fear of the future. In both ages, Louis takes the stereotypically male position that female trepidation can be conquered by romantic illusion. “Anxiety inspires,” he says to her, thus pointing up something fundamental in Bonello’s narrative methodology, since I can’t tell from my notes if it was 1910 Louis who said this or 2044 Louis. But there’s more. After the 1910 story is concluded, and as the 2044 one continues, a third tale taking place in 2014 Los Angeles unfolds. This time Gabrielle is a wannabe French actress house-sitting an enormous split-level mansion for an architect as she tries to gain a foothold in Hollywood. Louis is now an American incel YouTuber who carries a deadly grudge against all female pulchritude, and starts stalking Gabrielle after he spots her leaving a late night disco by herself. Is he the beast? Or is it the earthquake that suddenly pushes them into a weird confrontation?

Though Bonello’s situations and the arch dialogue delivered in both French and English (British and American, no less) keep the drama at arm’s length for much of the movie, there’s a cumulative power to the interactions between the principals of the three pairs of would-be lovers that finally comes to a head in suitably devastating fashion. In some ways, the repetition of images and motifs from one era to the next—dolls become models and then robots, a 1910 clairvoyant turns into an online fortune teller in 2014—feels cheap at first, but Bonello uses them to maintain a focus on the inevitable terrible outcome while distracting us from the most obvious source of that unease: Gabrielle’s snowballing insecurity. Bonello’s philosophical gamesmanship does not in any way diminish the power of her desolating realization, which, given how calculated it is, proves the director’s real talent as a storyteller; perhaps not the equal of James, but one who has learned his literary lessons very well. 

The noted French director Leos Carax is compelled to confront his own future, as an artist no less, in the 42-minute curiosity It’s Not Me. Asked by a museum what he’s up to these days and where he’s going, Carax says in voiceover right at the beginning of his film collage, “I don’t know,” and then endeavors to prove it. Obviously cribbing from the work of late-career Godard, Carax fashions a wry, often cynical visual essay on the value of creative self-examination that uses a lot of found footage; scenes from movies that mean something to him, including his own; documentary and news clips; and a few original things he came up with just for this project. 

Though there’s a lot of commentary on the meaning of cinematic form, what gives the movie its unique allure is its humor. Carax has a grand old time pulling the viewer’s leg, as when he keeps throwing old shots of men in public places onto the screen, trying to remember which of them is his father, and you soon realize none of them are; or when he starts talking about Roman Polanski as someone who might “be like me” because he is also a filmmaker, but one who survived the Holocaust and eventually “raped a child.” Carax’s muse, Denis Levant, shows up as Monsieur Merde, a purposefully offensive character who we’re encouraged to believe represents Carax’s values, though as the film reaches its apotheosis those values curdle into rage at the basic indecency of the world, punctuated by a title card that exclaims definitively, “Fuck God!” The compositions are better than Godard’s, the writing funnier than Mel Brooks, the sentiments more infuriating (and thus more inspiring) than The Essential David Bowie, which Carax also samples. And it’s got one of the best end-credit sequences ever conceived. 

The Beast, in French and English, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

It’s Not Me, in French and English, opens April 26 in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Beast home page in Japanese

It’s Not Me home page in Japanese

The Beast photo (c) Carole Bethuel

It’s Not Me photo (c) 2024 CG Cinema-Theo Films-Arte France Cinema