Love, again
Lea Seydoux plays a time-traveling romantic in ‘The Beast’
France’s reigning star with international clout, Lea Seydoux showcases three women, all named Gabrielle, in three distinct time periods in the romantic, time-traveling “The Beast.”
Uniquely original, French writer-director Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” loosely adapts Henry James’ 1903 novella “The Beast in the Jungle.”
Bonello begins in 1910 Paris, skips to Los Angeles in 2014 and then leaps into a futuristic 2044. As the time periods shuffle, each era sees Seydoux’s Gabrielle meet Louis (George MacKay of “1917”).
“The Beast” was initially conceived for Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel, the French actor known best here as the face of Bleu de Chanel. His sudden death in a Swiss skiing accident in early 2022 threatened to derail the project.
“I felt that I had to do the film,” Seydoux, 38, said in French-accented English in a phone interview. “I had to do it because first of all they needed me” — as a bankable star.
“But also I was curious about this film. When asked, ‘What’s the subject of the film?’ it’s very difficult to answer. Because it’s about so many things but it’s very contemporary.”
In each setting Gabrielle is foreshadowed by a terrible event. We come to understand that each era links these two to their pasts and the future.
“For me it’s about loneliness,” Seydoux said. “This craving that we have to be able to communicate and the desire to love.
“Is it about destiny? Or evolving? Or shedding the scars of lessons of your past and trying to become a better person?
“I don’t think it’s a moral film,” she noted of the film which is in French and English. “It’s not like a lesson about life but it’s more philosophical. It’s also about questioning and experimentation.”
Seydoux’s star has risen in a series of Hollywood hits, from “Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds” (2009), Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and the Tom Cruise 2011 “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” to Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and with Daniel Craig in his final Bond films, “Spectre” and “No Time to Die.” Her biggest French hit is “Blue is the Warmest Colour.”
“Where I see my career, it’s not like it’s controlled.
I’m very instinctive. First of all, what I love the most is to work with the director and to collaborate.
“I work with the people that I admire and that have a view on things that I find interesting. I’m not thinking, ‘Yes! I’m going to have this career in France, this career in America.’ It’s just that I meet people and I’m like, ‘Let’s have this conversation together.’
“It’s a bit of, I think, thinking about my own pleasure.”
“The Beast” opens April 12