This is a Bergen Film Club podcast.
Hello!
Welcome to The Reel Thing.
I'm your host, Joe Lawrence.
The Real Thing is an extension of Bergen Film Club, which is an independent cinema society
in Bergen, Norway.
As part of our program, we aim to include films that don't get the limelight that they
deserve, so we try and shine said limelight upon them, highlighting small minority country
films, female directors, and so on.
This podcast, I talk about the films that are included in the program, applying some
more information, wider context, into the presentation of the film.
Today we have a very special episode.
We were joined by Hanna Römsing, which she is a former BFK member and is a current librarian
extraordinaire at the Bergen Public Library.
We showed the movie The Beast from 2023, or La Bête in French, which is based on a Henry
James short story called The Beast in the Jungle from way beginning of the 20th century.
We did a collab screening with the library, where we had a pop-up library just to kind
of contextualize the film and talk about adaptations in general.
Hanna joined us to talk about this.
This was a really great conversation.
I really enjoyed it.
It was insightful.
Hanna is a wealth of knowledge on all things.
So it was great to have a real pro on the podcast for once.
Without further ado, here is mine and Hanna's conversation about The Beast.
Hello.
And welcome back to the podcast, Hanna Römsing.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Thank you for coming back.
You're a BFK family, I guess, podcast alum, BFK alum and librarian extraordinaire.
Thank you.
That is a combination of titles I'm very happy with.
Yes.
So you are joining us to talk about the movie The Beast from 2023, which we recently showed
at the Film Club as part of a collaboration with Bergen Film Club and the Public Library
and Bergen.
Don't talk about that collaboration.
Sure.
It was a magical night.
And I hope people who were there will get to listen to this episode and hopefully get
some thoughts going on how to navigate the movie.
Because that's what the collaboration was all about.
We are doing a series of events at the library where we try to take advantage of the nice
symbiosis that exists between a film adaptation and the original work.
Because we find a lot of the time when there is an adaptation and maybe The Beast is not
as obvious because you have to know that it is based on a novella to be interested in
finding the text.
But let's say with Dune or any kind of major film based on a major book, we see that people
really want to read it.
And we see the numbers really go up for that specific book.
And it can also be a great incentive to read if you have seen a movie and you just want
more.
And I think that The Beast and The Beast in the Jungle is the perfect example of how you
can both perhaps understand the film better.
And maybe you can also get completely new ideas from it.
So we wanted to encourage that.
And I'm very excited to talk about how that actually translates in the film.
Yeah, great.
It's a very cool concept for sure.
Something I definitely relate to massively because that's why I read Dune is because
I watched the films and it kind of propelled me.
I was like, I need to know more about this world right now.
So that's what led me to read the books this year.
And it must have really been amazing because for me it was the other way around.
And I read this gigantic work and then I thought like, how are they going to do it?
First of all, I was very happy that it wasn't crammed into single running time like David
Lynch tried.
But when it's the other way around, you feel this universe expand and you always know like
this is a place I want to be.
This is a place I want to visit.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was just so like, I need to know everything about the worms and I need to know everything
about the Bene Gesserit.
So now I'm beginning my own crusade through the Dune series, actually.
Yeah, I hope you got what you wanted, but I'm pretty sure you did.
Yeah, so we're not here to talk about Dune, unfortunately.
But fortunately, we are here to talk about The Beast from 2023.
As you mentioned, it's an adaptation of the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle
or novella, I should say.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that as a novella and how it kind of acts as a
springboard into the universe of the film?
Sure.
So Henry James is probably known to the people that are aware of him for his famous ghost
story Turn of the Screw.
And that is ambiguous in a way, and that's why his authorship is considered a transition
between realism and modernism, because he really goes into the psychology of his characters.
And that is definitely happening in The Beast in the Jungle.
It's a novella, a short story, and that means that in quite a short read, you can get this
amazing, dense allegory that Bonello chooses to make his film explore and take even further.
But it's based around a very simple premise, a man and a woman meet at a party, and they
are very aware of each other from the beginning, and they wait to be alone.
And they have this recollection of each other from an earlier event.
And when the man finally admits it, the woman corrects him on some details, and then she
says, I'll never forget you because you said something that I'll always remember.
And they talk back and forth, and she admits what he said that time in Naples.
He said that he felt like there was a disaster that was going to happen to him in his life,
and that it was waiting for him like a beast in the jungle.
And then you can kind of feel their connection very vividly, and she decides that she'll
watch for him.
She'll watch for the beast with him, and then the story moves on to describe their relationship
through life.
They go to the opera.
They become companions in a way, platonic companions.
And then towards the end of her life, when she becomes sick, it's clear that she tries
to communicate with him that she has realized the awful event or what it is she tries to
tell him.
And then he does not really understand, and he comes back to her later, and she says,
it has happened.
It has passed.
The event you were scared of has passed.
And he still does not realize.
And then she dies, and he travels the world.
He is not really impressed by it.
He's grieving.
And then he's at a graveyard.
He visits her tombstone.
He's standing there reflecting, and then he sees a man who had passed, and he sees a look
of ravenous grief on the man's face.
And he realizes that the man has loved and lost, whereas he has just lost.
And the beast, the tragic event was that being afraid, being scared of life, living in fear,
and most importantly, being afraid of love, meant that they were never together, and that
the fear itself kept him from experiencing life.
And then I believe he dramatically dies on her grave, but that's implied.
Yeah, kind of throws himself down or something.
But yeah, I think it's for such a short novella, there's so much like, it's like you say, like
absolutely packed full of, of metaphor and allegory that you can, you feel the kind of
hugeness of their life in such a short amount of time.
I found it really frustrating to experience that character in a way, because I think when
she's admitting to him what the beast is, or that it's passed in a way, I was like,
oh, it's like, I wish he could just see what she's trying to tell him and he misses it,
which I mean, is the point.
But I think it's such a relevant and human story to tell, I guess.
It's very interesting in terms of fate as well, because you, you can believe in something
happening and being so dead set on it that it just completely passes you by.
Not nice.
You do.
Yeah, but it's, despite its kind of largeness, it is quite inherently quite a simple story,
I think you could say.
Not like simple in theme, but simple in telling, with being quite short.
How do you think that translates into the film, the kind of like grand, huge evolving
blob of the beast, the movie?
How do you think the adaptation works?
Well, how does Bonnello take that and run with it?
I think that the short story is almost like an Aesop's fable.
It kind of teaches you a lesson of not letting fear of the thing keep you from experiencing
it.
But Bonnello, he really takes that kernel of love and fear and creates a film that kind
of sees love and fear in this death wrestle, basically.
So it has three kind of simultaneous versions of itself, and it's centered around this couple
from the short story.
They're called Louis and Gabrielle.
And in the first representation of this theme, it's set to 1910, and it's very faithful to
the story.
You kind of get to experience the essence of the short story, and it's almost lifted
line by line.
But then he asks, how is this exploration of love and fear relevant through different
points in time?
He also chooses to explore genre here.
So he sets Louis and Gabrielle up as this couple that are destined to meet through the
ages basically once in 1910, once in 2014, and once in 2044.
And in each iteration of their doomed love story, you see the same signs, and you see
a repetition of warnings.
And the very last iteration that the film is structurally based around is a science
fiction element where Gabrielle is living in 2044.
Unemployment is at 67% because of artificial intelligence, and human emotion is considered
superfluous now.
And she agrees to go through a process of purification.
And what is meant by that is that she gets to experience her past lives in order to understand
her trauma and then become free of it in a way.
But what is freedom if it's at the cost of not being who you are, essentially, is the
question.
So Louis and Gabrielle are in this love, fear, death dance across time.
And because it visits their story in different contexts, in a way, it makes the love story
more epic.
But in a way, it tries to explore this theme in an even more modern, virtual, digital,
different way than the book, because the book is saying love is possible, but you have to
get it.
You have to be open to it.
Whereas the film seems to ask in the end, is love even possible?
Is connection even possible, even if you find the right person?
Yeah.
The emotion and the importance or not importance of emotion and connection is the driving thing
between all the three things.
But I thought maybe we can take it chunk by chunk through the three stories and talk about
how the story is kind of told in these three parts.
I think firstly, the melodrama, which is closer to the James, as I said, that tries to introduce
the audience to the question of what is the beast.
And in order for viewers to not be locked in to the melodrama or the period piece, he
starts right before that with this green screen scene.
And that means that you know immediately the green screen scene refers to the part of the
movie that's set in 2014.
And Gabrielle is made to stab this beast that is in the green screen room.
It's going to be added in post.
But because of that stark green screen that everyone associates with the virtual world,
you know that something is weird here.
And that intro sequence, the title sequence ends with a scream.
And then you go back to 1910.
So I think he has deliberately said the reason why I did that was that people don't get comfortable
and expect a period piece.
They know that it's going to get twisty.
They know that it's going to hop through time.
And then the period piece story is very beautiful, a bit counterfactual.
Paris floods in it, for instance.
But that's where they build up this love story between.
Really strongly.
Yes, because everything that happens afterwards is going to make you doubt this love.
But then you're going to feel, no, guys, there is a kernel of love in here.
And then the next is quite a departure from that.
Bonnello has switched the roles.
And while in the 1910 version, it is the woman that is afraid of the beast and it's the man
that decides to be her watcher.
But the gender is swapped around in the next section and he is afraid of love and she tries
to comfort him.
And he has this bizarre kind of incel character where Bonnello tries to ask, here is obviously
someone with very dark thoughts, violent thoughts, and he acts on them.
But what is driving the human beneath?
And then it's that fear of love again.
Yeah.
I was reading an article where he said that he thinks that all incels have this fear and
that they're just too afraid to admit to themselves that they have this fear of love and of connection.
So it was really interesting way to frame an incel storyline.
It also gave us such a fantastic character in Lewis Lewinsky.
It really is, and I think it's very bold to change it so drastically.
Yet you have the kind of grounding to understand the motivation beneath and the fact that he's
trying to do something with it.
He's not trying to be sensationalist.
And where the male character was the comfort in the former iteration here, you have Gabriel
trying to reach out to this disturbed man, trying to tell him that another way is possible.
And then all these storylines converge in the real time storyline, which is the memory
purification process of 2044.
And this is kind of the last chance.
This is the last chance of these two people finding each other because Gabriel has, she
has seen their past lives.
She knows there is a connection to this person and she desperately searches for him knowing
all this.
Yeah.
Because surely he's experienced the same past life regression kind of journey.
Or at least my interpretation is that he also understands that there is a connection between
them as well.
Not when they first meet.
And that is kind of the, and I urge people who haven't seen it to see it now before you
hear this.
But this is the part where he kind of proposes that due to the way our lives have changed
so radically, connection becomes impossible because when they go through the process of
purification, they can become aware of this incredible soulmate-like connection, but he
ends up becoming purified.
She doesn't, so she knows what they have and he can't emotionally feel it.
No.
I think he gave it up.
Yeah.
I think, I don't know if I'm making too many kind of like board strokes in terms of connection,
but it really made me think, made me think two things.
Like the comment on like how important emotion is and that it can seem superfluous in a lot
of contexts and like it kind of spoke to me in a commentary on the emotional woman kind
of trope or not even a trope because it's like a real life thing people say.
But similarly, I was also thinking it can kind of be a commentary on emotion being kind
of like a detriment that there can be something as simple as like a bad feeling or like there's
examples of good emotions and bad emotions and not feeling the bad ones is good.
And I guess that's kind of what the film suggests and kind of like in a real life context, I
kind of see that as like a mental health kind of treatment commentary that you can kind
of, you can give up the bad, but you have to give up the good too.
You know, you can choose not to love because you don't want the bad thing to happen, but
that ultimately means that you will never love.
Absolutely.
And what does it mean to be human?
Fundamentally, if you could eradicate the extremes of feelings that are negative, you
would never get the extremes of feeling that are positive.
And in the moment where she realizes this, her scream is so intense.
And I think this is the brilliance of the movie.
That's a very abstract theme, right?
And in this lynchian way, they really kind of pierce through to the viewer and just suggest
this quite complex theme on how do we as humans value emotion and perhaps we're not looking
at it in the right way.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I guess it's something I've been really thinking about in the film since I saw the film.
Like, yeah, like just daring to love, daring to be vulnerable is something so scary, but
ultimately can have like a very fortunate payoff.
But that you do have to sacrifice a lot and do have to kind of accept the fact that there
can be something bad coming to it, which I guess is just a thing of living in fear and
never truly accepting your current situation out of fear.
It's just I know it was kind of like a glaring spotlight on myself almost when I was watching
the film.
It's like I feel like I really get I feel like also reading the short story as well
as like, how how much do I value my own emotion?
It kind of made me think like I'm very lucky to feel humans are very lucky to get to feel
at the extent that they do.
They are and there's this really great scene where you feel like this is kind of epitomized
by Bernalov because Gabrielle has to act out a scene on green screen.
This is in the middle section of the movie and she's asked, can you be scared of something
that's not there?
And you just think, yeah, you you really can, can't you?
And I think also Per in the film club reviewed this as the work of art in the age of digital
production, referencing the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, of course.
But I just also think like love in the age of digital reproduction in a way.
And I think that is really interesting when it comes to the form of the movie and this
kind of topic of censoring emotion, because it's a story that retells itself three times
in the course of the movie.
And in that way, it is kind of questioning the very existence of this as a tangible topic.
Like can love ever be original or is it forced now to be an imitation of itself?
So I think he said in an interview that this is a film that doesn't end when it's finished.
This is a film that you have to think about and kind of interact with too.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it can encourage a reflection, because you're
meant to use it in that way.
Yeah, well, it did its job for me, definitely.
Just in the view of like, sometimes you think it could be so much simpler to live without
anything.
So you can minimize your life so much in the way that the character in the short story,
he kind of minimizes his life with having his obsession with the bad thing that can
happen.
But without extremity of feeling, then your life and emotional life has no perspective.
There's no dynamic in your life, I guess.
You can't make any real tangible connection with anything if you have no perspective.
Despite the rattle-dattle of a huge period set piece, it all kind of collapses into nothing
in the end when they can't get that connection.
Which is a very like, that's very like, a real visceral imagery of it literally burning
down and collapsing around them.
It's like, I think that was a really perfect kind of way to visualize the feeling of the
destruction of realizing that you can't love someone, I guess.
If I could be so bold to say.
Of course.
No, it's very, very harrowing.
But I think it's definitely worth exploring further, because this is a very rich and dense
film, but the theme we're talking about is very universal.
Absolutely.
It kind of touched on it, the narrative that is the core narrative of the 2040 life that
she is living, but kind of how the digital world kind of connects us and unconnects us
in a way.
Not to ask a very vague question, but-
I love vague questions.
How connection works in the context of the film in our existence now and in the future
with how social media has evolved and how AI, scary not scary, is evolving too.
Interestingly, he chose to strip everything down.
You can go for an apocalyptic vision of the future, or you can go for really a number
of different visions of the future.
But he decides to just take away the superfluous.
He takes away cars.
He takes away other people, really.
And he makes this vision of Paris that is very clean, kind of beautiful, but the human
noise is very much gone.
And I don't think that we are quite there yet, but I do think that in the way that it
corresponds to our lived reality now, I think that you can kind of imagine connection to
other people based on non-reality.
You can feel like you know someone through social media or something like that.
And it's almost like she's on a quest to see if she actually can know another person in
this sterile environment.
She's desperate to.
And she's seeking to connect with anyone.
It seems like the depth of this, but when she's meeting these three women in the bar
in the 2014 story and in the 204042 and they reject her, she's seeming to me to grasp me
for connection in any way.
Like and her kind of existence herself is kind of a rejection of the world that's expected
of her in any regard.
Now her choice to feel her emotions is a rejection of what's expected of her and how everyone
else kind of lives their life, I guess.
And she's hunting for it.
Can people be real?
Yeah.
And she is, it's not only, it doesn't only extend to love because the idea here is that
most human labor has been replaced.
And she says, I want my work to have meaning.
I don't think that's so far away from us today, really.
To be removed from work.
I don't want to drag marks into this, but this is kind of the whole idea of alienation.
If you don't feel a connection and an understanding of why you're doing what you're doing and
that it is connected to you in some way, it's connected to what you can do.
This example is in a needle factory, if your job is to kind of place the top of the needle
on the needle and that's the only thing you're doing, that is totally different from making
a chair and saying, I made this, this has come from my hands and I'm proud of it.
And I think that's a totally legitimate question to ask.
What is the future of our feeling of connection with not only people, very importantly people,
but the world, how we can live, how we can work.
So yeah, it's almost like he has taken every big universal theme and just crammed it into
this visually stunning melodrama slasher sci-fi.
And I'm amazed.
It was my favorite film of the year, even though I didn't watch it until this year.
And I think as long as you're along for the ride, we probably made it sound very, very
dense, but it's also an epic love story that spans through the ages.
It's also that.
So it has a lot of different things for a lot of different people.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think anyone can find anything.
And it's so relatable in so many of its themes, like you said, like it encompasses a lot of
different things.
It's got me thinking a lot about, yeah, I feel like I've kind of made myself kind of
the spokesperson of not being on social media since I left social media like a month ago.
But even like, even my observation would kind of, so I feel like it was kind of like kismet
a little bit in seeing this film because I was like, hey, that's like what I've been
thinking about lately.
Just seeing like connection and how people are in the world, it kind of frightens me
how little people look at the world, I guess, and look at each other and have connection.
And I recently started working retail too, in terms of human connection.
It's like, if a lot of the people who you serve, I think if you ask them to describe
what I looked like when they walked out the store 10 seconds later, they won't be able
to even have remembered that there was a person standing in front of them.
I just think there's kind of like, I don't know what's the word, kind of automized process
of everything.
And everyone's just sort of like cruising along in this very kind of like blissfully
unaware of the real life that happens around them.
Kind of feel like that's kind of, that is a tragedy in a way, in the same way like we're
like missing out on each other and connection and not being on your phone.
And I don't know, it's just something I've been really kind of like paying attention
to lately, just seeing how people interact with each other.
And yeah, it's very strange.
Like not having left that, I feel very connected to my own life, but also incredibly unconnected
to everyone else around me.
It's very strange as someone used to be like obsessed with being online.
That just makes me think of my main point that I like to hammer home about science fiction,
which is that it's not about the future, it's about us.
Yeah.
And we're recently on the, well, a couple episodes ago, I was talking about kind of
climate fiction and dystopian future stuff, but it's actually like, it's like Margaret
Atwood, she claims that everything that she writes about in her books have happened already
or kind of happened in some shape or form.
And yeah, I think that's a lot of, everything in the beast is kind of occurring in some
way, shape or form.
And he did state his inspiration from David Lynch.
And I think that is very, very evident.
And I'm glad he said it because I thought the final part of the movie is very Twin Peaks
revival, very unreal.
And I think I kind of appreciate more and more films that kind of present you with an
environment or a feeling or an alienation.
And they don't try to tell you exactly what it is and exactly what it's doing, it is kind
of presenting it to you as something you can feel.
And I think that is very, very evident, but it's also kind of allows him to, in the same
way that Lynch does, I just watched Eraserhead actually for the first time and I was amazed
at what he was doing so early in his career.
Totally bizarre.
But you can kind of create, if you're a talented filmmaker, you can create human feelings of
alienation, of lack of connection and present it through a story.
I mean, that's why we love the movies.
It's like looking in a mirror, not liking what you see and then going home and thinking
about it.
And ending it with a piercing scream.
Yes.
And a frightening realization.
Yeah, it's like that moment I feel like, not that I've experienced that exact thing, but
like her, I say that kind of the way that she lives her life is a rejection, but that's
like a moment where she's like actively for me, like kind of rejecting like, I don't want
this to be happening right now, which I feel I can relate to.
But I think that's like Leia Sadoo is just like amazing in this film.
It goes without saying because she's kind of like the focal point of the movie and George
McKay is obviously great too, but she just, I don't know.
I don't know if that's like a good comment that you kind of like forget that this is
a movie and she's acting in it.
Like it was unbelievably and unbelievably real performance from her.
It was incredible.
They're both carrying the film extremely well for a story that is so bizarre, literally
unreal and changing all the time.
The fact that they managed to retain us through that is an immense display of power.
Just circling back to what you said about the scream, I think it's absolutely essential
because for people who have seen the film or have heard us describe it just now, it
just piles on and on all these kind of open questions and ideas.
And then towards that end, it's almost like her scream just pierces through all that noise
and conveys to you this primal emotion.
And you're kind of just shaken a bit out of your seat.
So in a way it is saying connection is not possible.
That's why she's screaming.
But then that scream kind of reawakens the possibility.
She is still feeling an emotion intense enough to cut through to us in this very, very powerful
way.
Maybe the last question just simply can be, what is the beast for you?
For me?
Okay, so I wrote down what Bonello said quite literally the beast was in his interpretation.
I'm not gonna copy his answer, but let's see here.
Yeah, he says the beast is the fear of love.
And maybe I've said that already.
But I think that can be applied in so many different ways.
And I think I interpreted quite literally for myself, which is a lot of the time, we're
scared to do something because we don't want to shake things up.
And we don't want to rock the boat, or we feel like we have a comfortable life, or it's
easier to continue on a straight line.
But then when I look back on the choices I made that were a bit weird and a bit off the
timeline, I never really regretted them.
And I think that's the reminder for me, fundamentally, do the scary thing.
And usually, the scary thing is worth it.
Good.
That's a good interpretation, not too far from my own.
I just think it's a fear of living just for the same reason, whether it's someone saying
no or failing or the possibility of feeling bad.
Usually the big scaries are worth it in the end.
It's always better to feel.
And I think that is how Henry James concludes it quite literally, because he says, I would
rather be ravaged, hanged than not living at all.
On that high note, thank you very much for doing this.
This was really nice.
It was.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you very much again, Hanna, for joining.
It was a really great conversation.
And what a film.
What a film.
That's probably, if I go back, probably the best film of 2023 that I saw.
And it's filmally cemented in the pantheon of films that I esteem as being very, very
good.
I loved the film.
It was incredible.
And I'm very thankful for the film club to give the opportunity to see a film like this.
So very cool.
Yeah.
Thank you very much for listening.
More episodes, obviously, to come in the future.
Thank you.
Goodbye.