NYFF #1: The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011), The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
The shadow that’s loomed over my experience of the New York Film Festival thus far has been the death of Terence Davies, who passed away suddenly last Saturday. Davies, who made associative, lyrical films, often about his ambivalence regarding social conformity, was a personal inspiration. In films such as The Long Day Closes, an autobiographical memory piece about his prepubescent years, Davies grapples with his feelings of ostracization while celebrating his love for music, the movies, and his family through free-floating impressions of light and sound. For a person so deeply impacted by loose audiovisual impression - he was one of few directors seemingly born for the medium. Davies was a bracingly personal filmmaker whose career-long wrestling with his own queerness deeply affected me when I came upon his work just as I was just starting to recognize my own sexuality.
Thus, it’s not a huge surprise that one of the most special screenings I attended wasn’t even part of the New York Film Festival. The day after Davies’ death, I cleared my plans and set out to Queens where the Museum of Moving Image was showing The Deep Blue Sea on a 35 mm print with an introduction by Michael Koresky. I’ve never considered The Deep Blue Sea a favorite of mine, but the mixture of Koresky’s intro, the ghostly film projection, and more relationship experience under my belt had me convinced that The Deep Blue Sea is one of Davies’ best. The film is an adaptation of a Terrence Rattigan play about the married Hester Collyer, in near-fatal crisis over her decision to leave her husband for Freddie Page, a cruel man who doesn’t really love her, and its driving force is Hester’s devotion to her own self-destructive passion for him.
The film opens with Hester’s attempted suicide (a crime at the time), set to Barber’s violin concerto, as incidental flashes of Hester’s relationship are sequenced in a cascading series of dissolves. Rattigan was a gay man (as was Barber), and it’s not a huge leap to connect Hester’s “crime of passion” and her ensuing insistence on following her passion at the expense of social status as an echo of how an older generation of British artists felt about their sexuality. What Davies’ literary adaptations did so well is balancing Davies’ immediate personal connection to his characters with their self-sufficiency. Using graceful tracking shots and collective song, Davies crafts heightened melodrama that depicts Hester’s volatile relationship with an ambivalent mixture of empathy, envy, and inspiration. At its core though, he depicts Hester’s leap, and her ensuing struggle, with an awestruck beauty, one he perhaps dreamed of making.
One of The Deep Blue Sea's most memorable moments is a seemingly blissful one of Hester and Freddie slow dancing to Jo Stafford’s You Belong to Me. Dissolving from collective song to intimate dreamscape, it’s an impossibly gorgeous sequence of a couple in love, but not without the tentative doubts that underpin Freddie and Hester’s relationship. “I’ll be so alone without you” sings Stafford, “Maybe you’ll be lonesome too?”.
Out of extreme coincidence, the best film I’ve seen at the New York Film Festival by far, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, also contains a sequence set to You Belong to Me, although under extremely different circumstances. The song plays in the chronological middle of the film’s three sections, a Twin Peaks: The Return reminiscent vision of Los Angeles in 2014. The overarching sci-fi premise of the film envisions a near future, so quantified and sterile, that humans undergo a procedure to strip them of their past lives, a process which dulls their emotions, qualifying them for various forms of work. Loosely based on Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle, Lea Seydoux plays Gabrielle, who doesn’t want to lose what’s left of her humanity, but reluctantly undergoes (and fails) the procedure, delving into her past lives dominated by a series of missed encounters with a man named Louis. There’s a Belle Epoque section, set just before the Paris flood, as Lea Seydoux struggles to leave her husband for Louis, the 2014 Los Angeles section where Louis is reincarnated as a murderous incel, and the 2044 piece, where Gabrielle and Louis run into each other as they debate undergoing the purification procdeure. In each of the sections, either Gabrielle or Louis is overwhelmed with anxiety regarding a metaphorical “beast” that will completely obliterate them. In 2014, You Belong to Me plays over the radio as Louis stalks Gabrielle’s towering glass mansion in the middle of the night, a twisted interpretation of the song whose lyrics and vintage beauty mirror Louis’ possessiveness, his misguided righteousness, and the outdated social expectations that have set the foundation for his behavior. The song is a bit of a joke for both characters though. “I’ll be so alone without you” “Maybe you’ll be lonesome too” assumes that these characters aren’t already lonely.
Although Bonello has never enjoyed the wider recognition of contemporaries like Claire Denis or Olivier Assayas, he’s among my favorite directors. He’s a rare filmmaker whose work seems to defy articulation, and an artist whose films seem to spill out of his subconscious. His work is deeply concerned with how historical and sociopolitical changes affect our capacity to form relationships, mutating these concerns into something scarily biological. A composer and director, Bonello is singularly adept at evoking the textures, surfaces, and atmospheres of what it means to live in a specific time and place in daring, unintuitive fashion. He often does this through a sensuous style, weaving together aesthetic inspirations of genre fare and arthouse cinema into something altogether more slippery and uncanny.
My favorite film of his is House of Pleasures, which takes the core of its premise from Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai as it follows a group of young sex workers at a struggling upper-class bordello at the dawn of industrialization. A sumptuous film that seems to take place in a gauzy dream state, the focus of the film is the girls’ sisterhood in the face of systemic mistreatment and financial/bodily exploitation, a sisterhood that movingly transcends profitability and beauty. While most of the film lies squarely in the early 20th century, there are consistent hints that the temporality of the film is unstable. This is most poignantly provoked on the eve of the bordello’s closure, as the girls, unsure of their futures and when they might see each other next in this emerging socioeconomic landscape, engage in an unbearably melancholy slow dance to The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin, which Bonello pointedly marks as entirely diegetic. These discontinuities come to a head at the film’s conclusion, shot in grainy 2000s-era digital video, which suggests a modern version of this film with different social codes and concerns that’s lost the warmth of these girls’ deep social bonds. Profoundly, this warmth is also associated with the film’s extravagant surfaces, changes in society and humanity manifesting in film style and aesthetics. I can’t quite explain why these temporal discontinuities are so devastating, but on some level, they speak to a racing anxious mind, a sense of despair over the trajectory of humanity, and a layering of historical experiences constantly in conversation, yet never quite aware of each other.
I haven’t seen any of Bonello’s earlier work but since House of Pleasures, Bonello has focused his malleable, futuristic cinema onto child subjects, a topic clearly shaped by his experience as a father wondering what the world will look like for his daughter. Nocturama, his other masterpiece, centers a group of child terrorists who silently complete a coordinated attack on the city before hiding in a shopping mall for a Dawn of the Dead capitalist reverie. The film utilizes split screens, dizzying views of the city in claustrophobic tracking shots and birds eye view, and the boredom of anticipation to create a self-conscious distress, a sense of being spatiotemporally untethered, and an understanding of nihilism when faced with the overwhelming violence of historical power structures. Following Nocturama, Bonello directed the Haitian-set Zombi Child, a story of colonial ghosts, set in a boarding school. Just last year, Bonello premiered Coma, a genre-bending piece dedicated to his daughter’s experience of the pandemic. The film hasn’t been distributed in the US, but solidifies Bonello’s growing interest in not just diagnosing the present, but trying to imagine what’s just ahead.
In a sense, The Beast is the ultimate Bonello film, integrating his ideas over the past decade into a genuinely strange cinematic whats-it about humanity biologically losing its capacity for vulnerability. Cutting between its three sections, The Beast traces how history and aesthetics are constantly in conversation with each other, and how one set of social codes can indirectly shape the societal ills of future generations. There’s no good solution in The Beast: this catastrophic fear of mismatched expectations prevents connection, but this fear is also essentially human. This is a film all in service of its atmosphere of yearning and fear. The aesthetic and tonal instability of the film inhabits a sense of being trapped in the self, ping-ponging between different fantasies, fearful of the future, scared to confront the past, in utter panic about the present (this central atmosphere of societally and self-inhibited desire also makes this a potent queer film).
Lynch, who used Hollywood mythology as a stand-in for the palimpsest of artifices that construct our daily lives, is the perfect inspiration for Bonello’s unhinged agitation. Bonello has exploded Lynch’s foundations, using history, media, and aesthetics as not just construction, but also all of the noise that prevents us from being present. The terrifying manifestation of this noise has Bonello throwing literally every idea at the wall, risking stupidity at every turn (and embracing it at times) in exchange for a film that genuinely seems to be willing to try anything, creating haunting effects in the process (both via the ideas themselves and their underlying desperation). There’s a series of various clubs, pared down to a futuristic space themed after a different year every night, as the future is obsessed with specificity and completely devoid of contemporary expression (At one point, some girls tell Gabrielle, “The catastrophe has already happened. We’re bored shitless”). There are human dolls, and animatronic Annette dolls, there’s the imagery of a medium on a Macbook screen, completely covered by pop-up ads, and a motif of pigeons as a prophecy of doom. It’s seriously insane and my favorite new film in a number of years.
The film is perfectly captured in its opening, where Lea Seydoux, either in a fourth-wall-breaking scene or in the 2014 section, is practicing a shriek of terror in front of a green screen (a blatant callback to the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return). The metaphor of the Beast is everything and nothing, it’s the ambiguous artifice of the acting and the scene as cinematic reference, it’s the digital mediation of the pixels that make up the screen and the anxiety of the act of being recorded.