Love without time 6 points
La BêteFrance, 2023
Direction and script: Bertrand Bonello, inspired by The beast in the jungleby Henry James.
Performers: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda.
Duration: 146 minutes.
Premiere: in rooms only.
“Something was hidden, stalking him, between the coming and going of the months and years, like a beast crouching in the jungle. It mattered little whether the crouching beast was destined to kill him or die. The decisive point was the inevitable leap of the creature.” This passage from the novel The beast in the jungle (1903), from Henry Jameswhich Borges in one of his famous prologues considered “the goal of the psychological novel,” seems the starting point of Love without timethe new feature film by French director Bertrand Bonello. There is a nameless threat, an ominous catastrophe that pursues the female protagonist of this convoluted romantic fantasy in the actress through different eras. Lea Seydoux its first engine and almost its entire reason for being.
A sign of the times, the male protagonist of James is turned by Bonello into a woman, Gabrielle Monnier (Seydoux). It is no coincidence that the film begins with her in a completely stripped-down setting, a monochromatic green screen where Gabrielle/Seydoux (the character, but also the actress) must imagine a “beast” from which he will have to defend himself with all his strength. This prologue made in a “chroma” (as that empty space is called in cinema that will later be completed, through special effects, by other realities) functions as the metaphor of the entire film: a space without time that will materialize in the viewer’s imagination according to the designs of the director-demiurge.
What time does it take place? Love without time? What is the present from which Bonello narrates? It would seem that it is 2044, a future not so distant or different from the one we know – a bit like the way Godard constructed in Alphaville another future planet in the Paris of 1965 – except for the fact that Artificial Intelligence “has saved humanity” and has taken control. There was a civil war in the United States (a dystopia also imagined by the Alex Garland film that premieres simultaneously this week), there are 67 percent unemployed and 20 percent mechanical work. But there is no need to worry about feelings, which have been abolished by a treatment that evokes – at least in its effects – that of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), by Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman.
However, Gabrielle Monnier’s sensitivity and DNA are irreducible and her genetic memory leads her to connect with other incarnations of herself, in Paris in 1910 and in the city of Los Angeles around 2014. In the past of the Belle Epoque, Gabrielle lived a tragic love story, never consummated, with a lover who did not become one due to a natural disaster that actually occurred in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. And in Los Angeles she must face other misfortunes: not only an earthquake that further unbalances her own personal instability but also a sexual harasser and potential murderer – the beast from the original title? – who prowls around the lonely mansion she owns. in charge as caregiver.
Bertrand Bonello’s latest films have proven that Director of Nocturama (2016) and Zombie Child (2019) may become an accomplished author of fantasy films. Even Eatwhich participated in the 2022 Berlinale and was not known in Argentina, started from the reality of mandatory confinement due to the pandemic to enter the disturbing universe of virtual life and deep webwhich 2014’s Gabrielle Monnier also has issues with.
Unlike those titles, Love without time it appears more disjointed, less rigorous. It is also more ambitious – in its dramatic structure, in its production values - and that departure from the free spirit of class B cinema that aired Nocturama and Zombie Child here he returns solemnly to La Bête. However, Bonello has an actress of the caliber of Léa Seydouxcapable of sustaining – even in extremely demanding close-ups – a level of emotional commitment that compensates for the formal coldness of the film as a whole.
