A proponent of "New French Extremity", which brackets names like Bruno Dumont, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé and more recently, Julia Ducournau, Bertrand Bonello, who happens to appear in the latter’s Palme d'or winner TITANE (2021), seems to have a more level-headed disposition, his Yves Saint Laurent biopic SAINT LAURENT (2014) is a bedazzled panoply of haute couture and fast-consumed interpersonal relations which tactfully betrays a cold gaze of frivolousness and skepticism in its kernel. Such a severe look on humanity doesn’t abate in both NOCTURAMA and THE BEAST.

Starting in medias res - a brigade of youngsters betake themselves to various destinations in Paris by metro or on foot, either with seething agitation and trepidation, or aplomb, to carry some unspecified missions - NOCTURAMA grabs its audience by the throat roundly and refuses to let it go for the first hour with a kinetic motion and an engaging editing momentum. After a blunt assassination exacted by Greg (Rottiers), the oldest among the outfit (most of them are college age, save for one minor), and probably the mastermind, it clicks that they are revolutionaries-turned-terrorists. Then flashback pops up intermittently, shedding some light on incidents happened before the series attacks, but the whys and wherefores are never fully expounded.

After wreaking havoc with planted bombs (one on the upper stories of a high-rise, one inside a government building), and setting fire on automobiles and on the gilded bronze equestrian sculpture of Joan of Arc, the group retreats to the emporium "La Samaritaine" to lie low for the night (minus two going AWOL, including Greg), arranged by a mole among the building’s security team. Henceforth, the film, like the group of restless whippersnappers (unified by their lame music taste as the film might imply), who are gets bogged down in the stuffy, closed areas and passively wait for something horrible to occur, also languishes in a loopy cul-de-sac. Only David (Oldfield), dares to venture out and keep his finger on the pulse, seeking a sort of validation for their collective enormities, offered by an airy Haenel in a cameo appearance.

By being tight-lipped about the young terrorists’ backstories, any effort for empathy and compassion is shorn off by Bonello. You don’t try to rationalize terrorism, and every perpetrator must pay for such a grave crime, without exception. That is why he arranges a startlingly indiscriminating picking-off denouement for all of them, regardless of their color, gender, race or age, which is pretty agonizing to watch as you cannot turn away from beholding their doom, one by one, utterly ineluctable. But Bonello’s maximalist fiat is firmly implemented to deter any offender-to-be. Although his script fails to make a plausible justification about how the police can pin down these terrorists on the premises with precision, which can be judged as a copout for the sake of diegetic convenience.

THE BEAST, a quixotic reimagining of Henry James’ novella, is infinitely more ambitious and metaphysical. A modish three-tier fable about the vast profound of human emotion getting wiped out to oblivion by artificial intelligence.

Year 2044, Gabrielle (Seydoux) decides to purify her DNAs in order to find a better job, as emotions are considered as a demerit for its instability. During two purifications, Gabrielle relives her two separate past lives, one in 1910, another in 2014, where she is drawn to a young man named Louis (MacKay, expanding his ranges from a gentleman to a head case with considerable ease and assurance), who, in both cases, unsettlingly becomes the death of her.

The 1910 part is set in Paris and wreathed in a tactile belle-époque lushness. Gabrielle is a pianist married to a doll factory owner Georges (Scali), perpetually bedeviled by an unshakable sense of ominousness, which she only confides to Louis, she is compelled by the pull to leave Georges for Louis. But kismet has its own design on the star-crossed lovers inside the highly inflammable doll factory.

The 2014 part is in Los Angeles, Gabrielle is a model house-sitting in an architectonic residence, whereas Louis is an incel whose mental faculty dangerously escalates into a misogynistic fixation. Following Gabrielle from the nightspot she patronizes every night to her residence, Louis sets his sights on her. A the-fat-is-in-the-fire apprehension hovers around until one fateful night. Gabrielle, overlooking her fear and prescience form Gina, a medium on the internet (Hoskins, a hauntingly bedraggled soothsayer dwelling in the Ethernet under the garish red light), opens her door to Louis and consoles him with her corporeal warmth. Only the frozen heart of a radicalized incel doesn’t thaw easily, Gabrielle cannot escape from the talons of the so-called “beast”, her distressing fate is an alarming reminder of the grievous threat of unresolved inceldom.

Back to 2044, after two attempts, Gabrielle is diagnosed as an outlier failing the purifying procedure. Then she again tries to reconnect with Louis in this timeline, who previously expresses his concerns about the DNA purification. Only it is all too late when Gabrielle realizes that Louis has already his emotions purged, snuffing her last chance to communicate with him on the strict human basis. THE BEAST culminates in Gabrielle’s desperate screaming, bringing about a Lynchian absurdity that serves up an outcry to a future where humanity would be dying a slow death.

In both films, Bonello act like a merciless surgeon dissecting the hazards of our society with plumb dispassion, but in distinctive modalities. THE BEAST is, by turns, elegant, uncanny (a humanoid doll in the person of Guslagie Malanda is quite a knockout), tormenting and fatalistic, propped up by a career-best Seydoux effecting a heterogeneous selection of affect and quiddities; whereas NOCTURAMA is deceptively on cruise control when everything is in motion or everyone is anonymously spurred by a mission, clunky when acedia settles in. However, Bonello’s analytic capacity doesn’t really in fine fettle, he is more capable of highlighting his convictions than eloquently and instructively cobbling together a reflective yarn (the 1910 part in THE BEAST is tediously and mystifyingly patterned upon James’s original texts). In the event, the “extremity” in his works might well derive more from his pessimistic ideology about our species than from his ruthless methodology.

referential entries: Bonello's SAINT LAURENT (2014, 7.1/10); Anne Fontaine's REINVENTING MARVIN (2017, 6.3/10); Bruno Dumont’s FRANCE (2021, 7.0/10).

Title: Nocturama

Year: 2016

Country: France

Language: French, Belgium, Germany

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Director/Screenwriter/Music: Bertrand Bonello

Cinematography: Léo Hinstin

Editor: Fabrice Rouaud

Cast:

Finnegan Oldfield

Laure Valentinelli

Hamza Meziani

Manal Issa

Martin Petit-Guyot

Jamil McCraven

Ilias Le Doré

Rabah Nait Oufella

Vincent Rottiers

Robin Goldbronn

Luis Rego

Hermine Karagheuz

Adèle Haenel

Eric Herson-Macarel

Rating: 6.7/10

English Title: The Beast

Original Title: La bête

Year: 2023

Country: France, Canada

Language: French, Englihs

Genre: Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi

Director: Bertrand Bonello

Screenwriters: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit

based on the novella "The Beast in the Jungle" by Henry James

Music: Anna Bonello, Betrand Bonello

Cinematography: Josée Deshaies

Editor: Anita Roth

Cast:

Léa Seydoux

George MacKay

Guslagie Malanda

Martin Scali

Dasha Nekrasova

Elina Löwensohn

Marta Hoskins

Kester Lovelace

Julia Faure

Rating: 7.6/10