Year 2044. Artificial intelligence has taken over history and solved all of humanity’s problems. That they were not few. The United States has gone through a civil war. Already calm, for a Paris that is much emptier than usual, there are even animals roaming around. As for relationships, rather than virtual, they are incorporeal. It’s The beast, a film by the French Bertrand Bonello (a long story of love and heartbreak starring Léa Seydoux and George Mackay, which takes place in three eras, 1910, 2014 and 2044. And that through of classic and dystopian scenarios faces the fear of emotions in cinemas from today.
Emotions that in 2044 are repressed because they lead to disaster and pain. And a woman (Léa Seydoux), interviewed by the voice of an AI – that of filmmaker Xavier Dolan, co-producer of the film – faces the dilemma of eliminating them in order to access a relevant job that cannot depend on or resign from office Of course, to get rid of his feelings he must undergo a DNA purification process that involves reviewing his past lives to clean old traumas from the unconscious. And here she encounters a love story with Louis (George Mackay) that has passed time. feel afraid And I sense a catastrophe.
Paradoxically, if since the sixties in many films the AI ??generated a catastrophe, in The beast, perhaps a sign of a convulsive present, it is the one that puts an end to it. Before, AI, once it achieved consciousness, became a serious problem. He wanted to survive, like the persecuted replicants of Blade runner, a desire that often had lethal effects, as in 2001: an odyssey in space or Alex Garland’s Exmachina. His intelligence and power could be such that he directly decided to exterminate fragile human bodies, as in Terminator, or stop being interested in them completely, like the AI ??embodied by Scarlett Johansson in Her. However, in the midst of the current geopolitical tension, in the recent The creator AI was already becoming the hope of humanity. According to its director, Gareth Edwards, if humans have had problems it has been due to lack of intelligence, not excess. It was, of course, a closer hope, embodied by a robot girl, while Bonello (Niça, 1968), in his first journey through the genre, opted for a Cartesian AI dehumanized in the emotional.
“The film is almost a dystopia. I say almost because as time goes by we get closer and closer to what he proposes. In 2044, humanity has failed and AI has taken over. In the world there are no catastrophes, there is no pain, and this is terrifying. I wanted the future to be close enough so that the spectators could almost touch it, although I didn’t think that everything would have to happen so soon”, the director admits to La Vanguardia, in Madrid. And he explains that “in the film, at the time of 2044, there is a movement towards the disappearance of individuality, the singular. But if we make the fear disappear, so does the feeling of being alive. There is coldness and loneliness”.
Bonello explains that “so the tool dominates the human being, alienation appears. AI worries me, it worries me, we are dealing with something that is beyond us. And to regulate the artificial intelligence to use only the positive points I don’t know to what extent it is possible”. Will the way of making movies change? “It was the subject of the strike that ended six months ago. I had a good time at home asking the artificial intelligence for scripts. Write me a Bertrand Bonello-style script. And he did. It took about 30 seconds. I take three years. It was titled The Meanders of Time. I’m not saying it was good, but it wasn’t absurd either. It has that kind of ease that removes the pain of creation, also the surprise, the poetry, the sensitive. The intrusion of artificial intelligence into our lives is frightening. The AI ??saw me as what I am, not as what I could be.”
He bets on the film not to portray an extravagant futurism, but for an evolution of the world, especially behavioral and ideological. “It is a world full of a new serenity, reassuring on the outside, but terrifying on the inside,” he says of his 2044, contrasting with the anxiety that seems to be sweeping the globe today – “we have not been far from the civil war in the USA and we’ll see how the election year goes, there’s a crazy tension in every corner of the world”, he says – for which the story of Henry James that he has taken as the basis of the film serves him so well, The Beast in the Jungle , to which most of the dialogue in the long opening ballroom scene actually belongs.
“I took the main idea from James, that of a hidden beast, that we don’t know what it is, that will appear, and that creates a very powerful imagery. You can put whatever you want on the beast. The beast is threatening anywhere. We are all afraid of something. And the notion of fear is growing. We fear the environment, war, terrorism, the future, unemployment… everything. We are overcome by fear. And sometimes it’s wonderful because it allows you to lie in wait, like an animal, and be on the lookout. And for others it’s terrible because it paralyzes you, prevents you from moving forward.” In this regard, he warns that “today extremes are on the rise, there is fear of the foreigner, of the unknown, and extremists are based on communicating fear”.
Although, of course, as in much contemporary science fiction, The beast’s look into the future ends up being mostly a look at our innermost and most intimate world, our conflicts with emotions. “In the film in 1910 the feelings are expressed, in 2014 they are repressed and in 2044 they directly disappear”, emphasizes Bonello, who recalls that “for Henry James the beast he talks about in the story is the fear of love, the his work contains the whole essence of love error due to fear”.