Director-musician, literary filmmaker and painter, Bertrand Bonello has for the past twenty-five years been ploughing a distinctive furrow in the history of French cinema, blending the freedom of the Nouvelle Vague with the style of German painters and English poets.
Bertrand Bonello, a romantic filmmaker with the look of a cursed artist, was first discovered at the Berlin Film Festival in the late 1990s. At the time, Bonello was being hailed as the representative of a new generation of auteur filmmakers, and presented “Quelque chose d’organique” (1998), his first feature film. The story of the visceral, almost animal-like love between Romane Bohringer and Laurent Lucas. Bertrand Bonello then continued his exploration of carnal cinema with his second film, “Le Pornographe” (2001), in which, behind the portrait of an aging pornographic director, lies another story, that of the tender but difficult relationship between a father (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his son (Jeremie Rénier).
This was followed by several years in which the director, while continuing to shoot assiduously, remained confined to the cinematic margins, close to an almost underground cinema. These included a short film about Cindy Sherman starring Asia Argento, “Cindy: The Doll Is Mine” (2005), and “De La Guerre” (2008), the last Guillaume Depardieu film released during the actor’s lifetime.
It was with “L’Apollonide, Souvenirs de la Maison Close” (2011) that Bertrand Bonello made a name for himself with a wider audience. Selected in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and praised almost unanimously by the press, the film recounts the daily life of a high-end brothel in 1900 Paris, with a star-studded cast of French auteur filmmakers (Adèle Haenel, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Salette, Noémie Lvovsky…). Following this success, the director was entrusted with a project with a larger budget, dedicated to the “dark” years of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, between 1967 and 1976. Made with the “in principle” agreement of François Pinault (owner of the eponymous brand) but without that of Pierre Bergé, who preferred the more hagiographic biopic Yves Saint Laurent, released the same year, “Saint Laurent” (2014) dazzles with the beauty of its staging and the embodied performance of Gaspard Ulliel in the title role.
But it’s with “Nocturama” (2016), that Bertrand Bonello certainly signs his masterpiece (to date). Written before the November 2015 attacks but released afterwards, this strange feature-length film, punctuated by a score signed by the filmmaker himself, takes us into the empty interiors of a nocturnal Samaritaine, where a few well-bred young people take refuge after committing several terrorist attacks.
Finally, after two exciting but more confidential films (Zombi Child and Coma), the new Bonello is an ambitious film, signalling the director’s return to his first passion, tormented love stories, this time in the light of artificial intelligence.
“La Bête”, a free adaptation of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, opens in cinemas on February 7.
Pierre Charpilloz
La Bête de Bertrand Bonello
In cinemas on February 2.