Review of the film “Premonition” by Bertrand Bonello

The film by one of the most famous contemporary French directors, Bertrand Bonello, “Premonition” (La bete) is more than conditionally inspired by the story of the American classic Henry James “The Beast in the Thicket” (1903). After watching this film, annotated as a “romantic dystopia”, Mikhail Trofimenkov was tempted to compare Bonello with a “chicken” that “pecks at the grain” of the motives of outstanding films by other directors, resulting in an incomprehensible cocktail of them.

It is difficult to live in this – or, rather, in the next – world for the beautiful Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux). The fact is that she has to coexist with herself in three historical eras at once.

In 1910, marked by a catastrophic flood in Paris – the enraged Seine walked along the Rue de Rivoli, rolled up to the Louvre and other Elysee palaces – she was happily married to a doll manufacturer. He performs early works by Schoenberg on the piano and flirts with the cosmopolitan Louis (George MacKay).

In 2014, having changed her hairstyle and outfits, she makes a living by looking after a luxurious mansion in California in the absence of the owners. He tries out the role of a model, then, so to speak, an actress, posing against a green chromakey background for dubious videos about the need to follow traffic rules. Swallows even more dubious pills at a retro disco reminiscent of a festival of the living dead. And he continues to flirt with the same Leo, who in his new incarnation turns out to be a brooding psychopathic virgin, a hunter of blondes who do not succumb to his charms.

Finally, in 2044, already in the era of the omnipotence of artificial intelligence, Gabriel lies down in a bath with some sickening black liquid to undergo a “cleansing” or “DNA correction” operation. That is, the erasure of past emotions, without which in a beautiful and almost depopulated new world, human individuals have no social prospects.

Unfortunately for her, she turns out to be one of those seven-tenths of a percent of individuals who are not amenable to psychocorrection, no matter how many times they stick a “cleansing” needle into their ears. In this incarnation, Gabriel, of course, will also meet Louis, which is where the action of the film ends. And the stunned viewer, not understanding anything from their relationship, will only understand that Léa Seydoux can emit brutal screams no worse than the Hollywood stars of yore when meeting King Kong.

The heroine’s confused journey between eras is diversified not only by her screams. She will die a couple of times, drowning in her husband’s factory that was on fire and at the same time flooded, or taking a bullet in a Californian swimming pool. But the earthquake in California will survive safely.

Three times a dove will fly into her abode – either the Holy Spirit, or, as Louis will explain, a harbinger of trouble. She will step into yet another dead pigeon with her bare foot on a California lawn, but on a Parisian street she will meet a gentle llama. A certain fortune teller will give her vaguely threatening predictions three times. One more detail: the bartender in the mystical cabaret will also turn into a pigeon. The talking and extremely nasty doll will be transformed into a body-positive and indistinguishable from living beings African-American woman Kelly (Guslagi Malanga).

This entire completely schizophrenic and pretentious mosaic could be considered surreal visionary work, if not for one “but”. With remarkable self-confidence, Bertrand Bonello brings to the screen not his own visions, but visions that other directors had long ago.

Here, in the interiors of 1910, worthy of the pen of Marcel Proust, Gabriel and Louis try to understand how they know each other and where they met. Was it in Rome or Naples? Come on, you met “last year in Marienbad.” This was the name of the great hallucination film of the luminary of the “new wave” Alain Resnais (1961). And there, too, the heroes, prisoners of the “eternal return” of memories, tried hopelessly to understand who they are, where they come from, where they are going.

Michel Gondry managed to erase the feelings and memories of his characters much more successfully and more fun in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004). The puppet motif in Bertrand Bonello’s interpretation is equally unoriginal. There was such a great film by Krzysztof Kieslowski “The Double Life of Veronica” (1991) about two Veronicas, a Frenchwoman and a Polish woman, whose lives were bizarrely reflected in each other. And there was a hero-puppeteer there who explained that, just as in any puppet theater a copy of any other doll is always ready in case of breakdown, so it is in life. Like there is a Great Puppeteer who prepared an understudy for each of the mortals.

Poor Kieślowski: he was only talking about understudies. And Bonello – why waste time on trifles – is building an entire doll factory on the screen, where celluloid Gabriels are baked in industrial quantities, constructing a world of the future, where, perhaps, there are more dolls than people.

It’s difficult to even talk about the genetic connection between “Premonition” and David Lynch’s films from “Blue Velvet” (1986) to “Inland Empire” (2006). Bonello told Lynch everything he could and could not do, including the interiors of the very club where the bartender, after sipping a cocktail from a shaker, flies out the window on pigeon wings. A shameful movie, in a word, like pickpocketing.