Year 2044. Artificial intelligence has taken over history and has solved all of humanity’s problems. Which were not few: the United States has gone through a civil war. Already calm, now in a Paris that is much emptier than usual, there are even animals roaming around. As for relationships, more than virtual, they are incorporeal. It is The Beast, a film by Frenchman Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent, Le pronographe), a long story of love and heartbreak starring Léa Seydoux and George Mackay that takes place in three eras, 1910, 2014 and 2044. And that Through classic and dystopian scenarios, it faces the fear of emotions in cinemas 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 to access a relevant job that cannot depend on them or resigning from the position. Of course, to get rid of her feelings she must undergo a DNA purification process that involves reviewing her past lives to clean old traumas from the unconscious. And there she stumbles upon a love story with Louis (George Mackay) that has crossed time. She feels afraid. And she senses a catastrophe.
Paradoxically, if since the sixties in many films AI has generated a catastrophe, in The Beast, perhaps a sign of a turbulent current situation, it is the one that ends them. Before, AI, once it achieved consciousness, became a serious problem. He wanted to survive, like the persecuted replicants in Blade Runner, a desire that often had lethal effects, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey or in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Its intelligence and power could be such that it directly decided to exterminate fragile human bodies, as in Terminator, or to completely stop caring about them, like the AI ??embodied by Scarlett Johansson in Her. However, in the midst of the current geopolitical tension, in the recent The Creator, AI has already become the hope of humanity. For its director, Gareth Edwards, if humans have had problems, it has been due to a lack of intelligence, not an excess of it. It was, yes, a closer hope, embodied by a robot girl, while Bonello (Nice, 1968), in his first journey through the genre, opts for a Cartesian and emotionally dehumanized AI.
“The film is a quasi-dystopia. I say quasi because as time goes by we get closer and closer to what he proposes. In 2044, humanity has failed and AI has taken power. In the world there are no catastrophes, there is no pain, and that is terrifying. “I wanted the future to be close enough so that viewers could almost touch it, although I didn’t think everything would happen so soon,” the director acknowledges. And he explains that “in the film in the time of 2044 there is a movement towards the disappearance of individuality, the singular. But if we make the fear disappear, the feeling of being alive also disappears. There is coldness and loneliness.”
Bonello explains that “as soon as the tool dominates the human being, alienation appears. AI worries me, it worries me, we are facing something that surpasses us. And regulating artificial intelligence to only use the positive points, I don’t know to what extent it is possible.” Will it change the way of making films? “It was the issue of the strike that ended six months ago. I had fun at home asking artificial intelligence for scripts. Write me a script in the Bertrand Bonello style. And he did it. It took about 30 seconds. It took me 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 scary. The AI ??saw me as what I am, not as what I could be,” says the filmmaker in a hotel in Madrid.
He bets in the film not on portraying an extravagant futurism but on an evolution of the world, especially behavioral and ideological. “It is a world full of a new serenity, reassuring on the outside, but terrifying deep down,” he says of his 2044, contrasting with the anxiety that seems to sweep the globe today: “We have not been far from civil war in “United States and let’s see how the election year goes, there is crazy tension in any corner of the world,” he says. An anxiety for which Henry James’s story that he has taken as the basis of the film, The Beast in the Jungle, serves so well, to which in fact most of the dialogues in the long opening scene in the ballroom belong.
“I took the main idea from Henry James, that of a hidden beast, that we don’t know what it is, that is going to appear, and that creates a very powerful imaginary. You can put whatever you want on the beast. The beast is lurking everywhere. We are all afraid of something. And the notion of fear is growing. We are afraid of the environment, war, terrorism, the future, unemployment… everything. We are invaded by fear. And sometimes it’s wonderful because it allows you to lie in wait, like an animal, and be aware. And other times it is terrible because it paralyzes you, it prevents you from moving forward.” In that sense, he warns that “today extremes are rising, there is fear of the foreigner, of the unknown, and extremists rely on communicating fear.”
Although, of course, as in much of contemporary science fiction, The Beast’s look at the future ends up being above all a look at our most interior and intimate world, at our conflicts with emotions. “In the film, in 1910 the feelings are expressed, in 2014 they are repressed and in 2044 they directly disappear,” highlights Bonello, who recalls that “for Henry James the beast he talks about in the story is the fear of loving, “His work contains the entire essence of failure in love due to fear.”
