Bertrand Bonello

FRANCE - PARIS

Bertrand Bonello

Pierre CHARPILLOZ

DANCE MOVIE THEATER
28th February 2024

ACUMEN No. 43

a player, film

BERTRAND BONELLO, ROMANTIC FILMMAKER

Director-musician, literary and pictorial filmmaker, Bertrand Bonello has been carving out a unique path in the history of French cinema for twenty-five years, where the freedom of the New Wave blends with the style of German painters and English poets.

Bertrand Bonello , a romantic filmmaker with the air of a tortured artist, was discovered at the Berlin Film Festival in the late 1990s. The director, often hailed as a representative of a new generation of auteur cinema, presented his first feature film , Quelque chose d'organique (1998), there. It tells the story of a visceral, almost animalistic love between Romane Bohringer and Laurent Lucas.

Bertrand Bonello then continued the exploration of a carnal cinema with his second film, The Pornographer (2001), where, 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 (Jérémie Renier).

For several years afterward, the director, while continuing to film assiduously, remained confined to the cinematic margins, close to an almost underground style of filmmaking. Notable examples include a short film about Cindy Sherman with Asia Argento, Cindy: The Doll is Mine (2005), and De la guerre (2008), the last film with Guillaume Depardieu released during the actor's lifetime.

It was with House of Tolerance (2011) that Bertrand Bonello gained wider recognition. Selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival and almost unanimously praised by the press, the film depicts the daily life of a high-end brothel in 1900s Paris with a cast of stars of French art-house cinema (Adèle Haenel, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Noémie Lvovsky…).

After this success, the director was entrusted with a project with a larger budget, devoted to the "dark" years of the couturier Yves Saint Laurent, between 1967 and 1976. Made with the "agreement in principle" of François Pinault (owner of the 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 with the embodied performance of Gaspard Ulliel in the title role.

But it is with Nocturama (2016) that Bertrand Bonello undoubtedly created his masterpiece (to date). Written before the November 2015 attacks but released afterward, this strange feature film, punctuated by music composed by the filmmaker himself, takes us into the empty interiors of a nocturnal Samaritaine department store, where a few well-educated young people have taken refuge after committing several terrorist attacks.

Finally, after two compelling but more low-key films ( Zombi Child and Coma ), Bonello's new film is an ambitious one, marking the filmmaker's return to his first passion—tortured love stories—this time viewed through the lens of artificial intelligence. A loose adaptation of Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle , The Beast, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay , can be seen in theaters starting February 7th.