The Beast (2023)

This movie haunted me.

Yesterday I learned a friend was interested in seeing this French film at a local independent theater. It was a nice day outside, so I took a walk through the neighboring area. Outside the theater there was a local culinary street fare with small plates. I went to a local bakery instead and bought two croissants, a cinnamon roll one for myself and a chocolate one for my friend when he arrived.

I knew very little about the film itself, but my friend is extremely good company to watch a film. He is very excited about details, themes, motifs and even the legacy for how a director tends to execute his or her vision.

I didn't even remember from the trailer that the movie was French. The logline about a woman in the future cleansing her DNA of trauma didn't clarify either

The movie begins with a woman set in a green screen to the left, being given directions for how to block her steps for the later post production. The camera follows as she centers in the space, then gradually focuses on her face, getting intimately close to it, but the score is not alarmed, so the audience is not signaled to find this uncomfortable. But the direction off screen tells her that eventually she will notice a Beast to her right and to react to it when she realizes it has been there, waiting.

The scene switches to a different setting. The actress is wearing fancy clothes from a much older period where etiquette was armor. This shot tracks her through a cocktail party, looking for her husband and instead finding a stranger she met once while abroad, in whom she confided. This confidence was with the freedom of believing that she would likely never meet him again, and her secret would be like telling the wind. There are times where it is easier to tell a stranger something than a friend, for the stranger is a blank slate upon which you can plead your case for human sanity and they do not have a vested long term interest to hold you accountable to it later. Except this stranger has reencountered her and has follow up questions as to why she felt trapped since childhood with a sense of impending doom and desolation not only for herself, but for all whom she loves. How it will come in one fell swooping stroke and only then will her fears become realized into reality.

The rest of the film proceeds in much the same manner, as details of the woman's life and motifs are told over time and space. The audience too is waiting to see if her fears will be proven true. And the film's score heightens the anticipation. You wonder if you can truly trust it to signal you for the event or leave you to figure it out yourself visually without accompaniment.

Eventually, the logline of the movie comes into play. There is a technology to cleanse people's DNA of generational trauma. The process gradually neutralizes triggering effects of irrational and unstable emotional twitch instincts. Maybe this will be the answer to our heroine's dilemma. Whether it will vaccinate her from living with the burden of dread or even allow her to react more decisively when the key moment comes rather than be frozen and helpless in the face of fate.

The movie being primarily in French made me reflect on a passage in the science fiction Culture novel "Master of Games" by Iain M. Banks. How language makes certain frameworks of understanding and thought processes. It is not only an organizational method of concepts, but influences how to think about things. Our relationships to objects and emotions can be nuanced by what paths we know for how to think about them and how much they are given consideration in the language for variations on the theme. And from the French movies I have seen, the translation is not only of the language, but the concepts underlying and overlaying it. I think Iain's series is well named, because his books often wrestle with the inevitable clash of philosophies and cultural traditions which are rigid and flexible in incongruous ways. And how one of them will find others to be intolerable and feel the need to fix the other by diplomacy or force, because if that other school of thought is allowed to survive, it is a danger to the continuance of their tradition.

This film made me confront the question in my mind. What if my anxieties could be cured? Would I be willing to pay the cost? Even if it advantaged me to be divorced from my worries and stress, would I feel the loss of those traits like the removal of my wisdom teeth? Or would it be a deeper ache like I have lost my soul and the ability to truly enjoy the success, like Captain Barbossa with his apples in "Curse of the Black Pearl"?

And what if I seek the wisdom of the scientists and mystics, and their best efforts are not enough to correct what is within me? Is it better to live in the dread of the unknown, or be trapped in the confirmation that there is no salvation on earth for that which ails me?

Paralysis weight

An anticipation waits

Music of Tom Waits