On Friday night, audience members laughed, groaned and marveled at a film that refused to reassure the audience.
They were watching "The Beast" , a science-fiction thriller directed by experimental French director Bertrand Bonello. It was the fourth film screened in the six-week Albertine Cinémathèque French Film Festival, held in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium.
The festival lineup consists of six contemporary French films — screened once a week from Sept. 18 to Oct. 30 — ranging in genre from thrillers to animated comedies. There was a special emphasis on selecting and screening films that provide commentary on contemporary social and political issues, Pascale Bouchard, festival coordinator and graduate teaching fellow in the Department of Romance Studies, said.
“I feel like a lot of older French films don’t have the sort of diversity and relevant social discussions that I think are pertinent today and things that I’m personally interested in,” they said.
Friday's screening began with an introduction of the film by Sean Matharoo, a professor in the Department of Romance Studies. Matharoo introduced some main themes, a synopsis of the film and some philosophy by Friedrich Nietzche to contemplate while watching. The film was dense and blended popular genres of historical drama, slasher and science fiction, Matharoo said.
The film spans many decades, going from a period drama sequence depicting 1904, to an “influencer” era portion set in 2014, to '60s and '70s club scenes, and more. Due to its nonlinear narrative structure and frequent alternations between timelines, "The Beast" was a confusing, yet intriguing film, Jack Weinard, a sophomore biology major, said.
“I left the theater confused,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to process. It was a film that threw a lot at me, lots of themes that interface a lot with the modern world, but also through the lens of the future and the past, and they cut between timelines and cut between people a lot.”
The film stars recent "Dune: Part Two" actress Léa Seydoux who plays Gabrielle, a young woman unsatisfied by her mundane job and decides to purify her DNA, a procedure that rids her of strong emotions deemed unsuitable for a good job.
"The Beast" disrupts modern editing and narrative conventions, similar to how films of the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and '60s did. Matharoo likened the film to "Alphaville," a famous New Wave science-fiction film by Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the French New Wave movement.
