Bertrand Bonello explains what anxiety is
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Leading French director, author of “Nocturama” and “Saint Laurent” Bertrand Bonello has released a new film, which has also reached Russian distribution. It is impossible to retell “Premonition”: the action takes place in parallel in three eras, and with the participation of the same two main characters. Bonello’s films always had a vague sense of disaster, and finally he made a movie about just that.
“You remember me? We met in Rome.” — “I remember, but wasn’t it Naples?” The conversation takes place in a Paris salon in 1910, pianist Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) talks with the impressive British man Louis (George MacKay). The dialogue is reminiscent of the classic film by Alain Resnais “Last Year at Marienbad” – there, too, in the setting of a social evening, the characters tried to remember where they met, and could not remember exactly. In Rome? In Naples? In Marienbad? Last year? The year before last? In the world of Bertrand Bonello’s Premonition, time is changeable and unpredictable. After the meeting in the salon, a little over a hundred years will pass, and Gabriel and Louis will meet again – in 2014 in Los Angeles: now she is an aspiring actress, and he is an “incel”, a thirty-year-old virgin who decided to take revenge on the world for his failures. Another thirty years will pass – and in the world of the future, in 2044, the same, but completely different Gabrielle will come for the procedure of “cleansing DNA” and, it seems, clearing her memories.
The original title of “Premonitions” – “The Beast” – refers to the story of Henry James “The Beast in the Thicket”, but although the American author is mentioned in all official summaries, calling Bonello’s film an adaptation would be an exaggeration. Details are taken from the story, but above all the picture owes to James that vague “premonition” that moves the plot and which is so difficult to depict or describe. “In the twists and turns of the coming months and years, something, lurking, lies in wait for him, like a crouched animal in a thicket,” James writes about his hero. Bonello’s heroine told her acquaintance about this unkind beast during their previous meeting, either in Rome or Naples, and then tried to forget her premonition as an irrational fear, an unhealthy quirk of the psyche. But the beast did not disappear, it only hid in the coming months, years, centuries.
If you try to explain “what” this film is about in one key word, then that word would be “anxiety,” but not in the psychiatric sense of “anxiety disorder” or anything like that: Bonello, as in all his works, avoids such interpretations. There is no madness in Gabrielle’s eyes. There are feelings – confusion, fear, love desire – but these all-too-human emotions do not explain what is happening to the heroine and do not even fully explain her herself. In one of the scenes in the future story, she must portray a “neutral humanoid expression,” and Gabrielle’s facial expressions are frozen for a long time in a motionless mask. Her face becomes blank, like the ceramic faces of the dolls that the heroine’s husband makes in the story about 1910. “Were you the model for those eyes?” – Louis asks the heroine Seydoux, having seen glass blanks with blue irises exactly like hers at the toy factory. “Perhaps,” she says, and together with Louis we look into her own eyes, trying to understand what she means by this evasive answer. If Gabrielle’s eyes are not a mirror of her soul, then what is?
Bonello leaves many questions without a clear answer, which will not appeal to every viewer. His paintings have previously caused bewilderment and irritation among many. “Nocturama” is a film about a cell of terrorists, from which, after two hours, it is impossible to understand either the purpose of their activities, or even what “nocturama” means. But is it possible to “explain” terrorism? Is it even possible to “explain” reality using flat rectangular images?
Bonello sees his task differently – to discern the irrational dimension of reality behind its outer shell. “The world is strange on the outside and wild at heart,” said one David Lynch film. In “Premonition” – the first work in Bonello’s filmography, where the action partly takes place in the USA – he finds himself unexpectedly close to his American colleague. The Gabrielle of 2014, looking after someone else’s luxury home and unsuccessfully trying to launch an acting career in Hollywood, is very similar to the main character of Mulholland Drive. The refrain phrase of that film is “It’s time to wake up, beauty!” – one could also apply to the heroine of “Premonition”, who in 2044 is plunged into artificial sleep by a robot with an insinuating voice. She could also be asked the question from the third season of Twin Peaks: “If this is a dream, then who sees it?” – but Gabriel will not be able to answer it, like all other questions.
In the twenty-odd years that have passed since Mulholland Drive, the world has become even more virtual, even more divided into images that reflect and distort each other. In 2014, Gabriel starred in a commercial against a green screen, talking with a fortune teller via video link, which replaced physical contact; in 1910, Louis read Gabrielle’s fate from the palm of his hand, taking her hand in his. The world of 2044 is even more sterile. Here, it seems, humanity is already dying out – perhaps everyone is hiding at home from some new virus: in any case, the streets are almost empty and rare passersby wear solid plastic masks. This world is sterile in the sense that it no longer gives birth to anything new. There is nothing left here except images and reflections of the past. The nightclub where Gabriel goes only plays 20th-century music—one night it’s 1972, the next it’s 1980, the patrons are dressed in appropriate fashion and dance without touching each other.
What kind of catastrophe is this film “anticipating”? In his visions of the future one can hear the echo of the covid pandemic, in the story about 2014 there is a feeling of social cataclysm. But even in the footage of the Paris “great flood” of 1910, one can sense the fear of a future flood that will cause global warming, even if the Belle Epoque did not yet know about the climate crisis. Trying in vain to understand when the world was broken: it never worked correctly. The beast was always inside him.
In theaters from April 4
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