the romantic dystopia of Bertrand Bonello

The cinema releases of the week with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “La Bête” by Bertrand Bonello and “Daaaaaali!” by Quentin Dupieux.

In The beast by Bertrand Bonello, Gabrielle is a young woman who applies for the French administration in 2044, but who to be accepted, will have to get rid of all affect, her emotions and also the traumas of her previous lives: such is the life that we promises artificial intelligence.

We will thus find her in the Paris of 1910, just before the flooding of the Seine, but also in the Los Angeles of the 2010s, in the shoes of an aspiring actress. Bertrand Bonello, who here adapts a short story by Henry James, takes us once again into one of his conceptual films, but without ever losing us.

The beast tells a lot of things, but above all a thwarted love, and the danger of a sometimes toxic masculinity, all in a world supposed to exist in 20 years, where artificial intelligence dominates our lives, and which already seems very current.

Daaaaaali! by Quentin Dupieux

Unstoppable Quentin Dupieux, at least one film per year, 1h18 this time, it’s almost long for this enemy of the superfluous. Daaaaali!, aith the letter ‘a’ six times like so many actors to embody the Catalan genius.

Obviously it’s anything but a biopic – parenthetically, putting an end to these biopics of famous painters is of no interest. It is the Dali public figure that interests Dupieux, the one who from the 1960s had perfectly understood the importance of television and advertising, pursued here by an amateur journalist, Anaïs Demoustier who despairs of completing an interview with the artist .

The film adheres to the dreamlike madness of Dali, a priest who recounts his dream “x” times with Dali, a rain of dogs, a twisted ending, it’s very virtuoso, like this scene shot in reverse, and broadcast at the location. With so many Dali, there is inevitably a match, and that is the only fault of the film: Jonathan Cohen and Edouard Baer far outdistance Pio Marmaï and Gilles Lelouche, but they were largely left out during editing.

As always with Quentin Dupieux, there is the absurd, but not only that, the two old Dali evoke the artist’s vanity, his finitude, it’s funny, poetic and touching.