Director: Bertrand Bonello

Stars: Léa Seydoux, George McKay, Guslagie Malanda

Inspired by the 1903 Henry James novella ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and set over three time periods, French writer-director Betrand Bonello’s romantic drama meets dystopian sci-fi flick features compelling ideas, but the picture is undone by a lack of focus over an extended two-and-a-half-running time. Seydoux is Gabrielle, a young woman living in a 2044 Paris where AI is taking care of most of the work, leaving a large part of the population unemployed. She is about to undergo an operation to relieve her of any troubling emotions. While under anaesthetic and bathing in a bath of slime Gabrielle imagines herself as a lady in 1910 Paris where she is wooed by Louis (McKay), a dashing Englishman she meets at a ball. In the third part of the triptych, Gabrielle is a struggling model-actress in 2014 LA, who attracts the attention of misogynist incel (also McKay). Motifs and images recur throughout the picture without really coalescing into a compelling whole. The Belle Epoque scenes work as an effective swooning counterpoint to the blanded-out future, both impressively realised by production designer Katia Wyszkop, but the LA sequences feel heavy-handed and clumsy, particularly McKay’s cliched incel character. The ersatz quality of these latter scenes may be deliberate or may be a casualty of writing dialogue in a second language. Either way they are a bit of a chore.

David Willoughby

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