2023-08-15 15:49:09
The Beast in the Jungle **
by Patrick Chiha
French film, 1 h 43
While waiting for Bertrand Bonello’s version, simply titled The beast and selected in competition at the Venice Film Festival, we can discover from Wednesday in theaters the one that Patric Chiha gave of the short story of Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle.
Enigmatic and fascinating, the writer’s short novel features a man, John, who drags a woman, May, awaiting a mysterious event that will upset his life, and who ends up missing out on the life. To the sophisticated and ironic prose of the writer, the Austrian director gives a more literal and organic content by creating a kind of temporal stasis which amplifies the feeling of this vain expectation.
A hypnotic trance that suspends time
Transposed to contemporary times, the story takes place behind closed doors of a nightclub where John and May, who knew each other as teenagers, meet by chance during its inauguration in 1979. They will all meet there Saturday nights for twenty-five years.
She is fascinated by this strange and lonely boy who continues against all odds to wait for what will happen to him. The soundtrack and the bodies swaying to the music alone mark the passing of the years, passing from the euphoria of the disco years to the coldness of techno while in the meantime, the ravages of AIDS empty the dance floor . Merging into a hypnotic trance that suspends time, they accompany the trajectory of May, a joyful and sunny young woman, who ends up withering away in the shadow of John’s immobility and his blindness.
romantic melodrama
The radical and deliberately disembodied bias of Patric Chiha may disconcert, but it has the merit of magnificently capturing the spirit of Henry James’s short story, “this terrifying feeling of missing out on one’s life, precisely because one hopes for a life above life”, he explains. The nightclub embodies this extraterritoriality, this place next to life, allowing all fantasies.
If the film sometimes abuses symbols such as the character of the physiognomist played by Béatrice Dalle, wrapped in a black cape, with which John seems to make a Faustian pact, the couple of main actors gives him all his flesh. Faced with an inflexible John to whom Tom Mercier, an Israeli actor discovered in Synonyms by Nadav Lapid, brings her phlegm, Anaïs Demoustier deploys the full range of emotions that run through May over the years. Her presence and her sensuality give life to this romantic melodrama that hides its name. When John realizes what he missed, it will be too late…
#Beast #Jungle #night