2023-08-15 19:13:39
Adaptation of the novel by Henry James, the feature film by Patrick Chiha is a camera with the air of an outlet that follows two characters in the same nightclub for twenty-five years.
A contemporary and very free reinterpretation of the famous short novel by Henry James published in 1903, whose existential obsession he picks up more than the plot, the film by Patric Chiha (author of the documentaries Brothers of the Night and If it was love) draws its spectators into an unprecedented experience: what if we spend the entire screening – twenty-five years in the time of the story – locked not only in the cinema hall but in a second black box: a club, the “ unnamed box”, which would have just opened in Paris. We would be in the 80s. In physio, there would be Béatrice Dalle, a good-natured gorgon who explains to us some rules of operation of the place. And then May, Anaïs Demoustier, adorned with a glamorous aura that we did not know her, enters it, filmed first by her high heel which beats the Parisian pavement, determined to go to the end of the night. Except that this night, she has no idea, will last a lifetime. By choosing to open his film with amateur images of popular balls, Patric Chiha places his film under the auspices of the pagan gods of the dance outlet and the multitude of possible lives: children, couples, old people, everyone one day recourse to dance to step aside from reality, to celebrate the beauty of the gesture.
Between the bodies and their incessant ballet
This vital impetus, in the club, will however be counterbalanced by the arrival of John (Tom Mercier), out of a melancholy tale of the 19th century, an indestructible vampire of dark romanticism. What he proposes to May is the opposite of movement: it’s adventure, but motionless, it’s diving but staying on the shore. Wait for this famous beast imagined by Henry James and featured in the film, at the very beginning, by a furtive image of Douanier Rousseau, this naive lion who looks us straight in the eye. All these elements put together, agitated in the box (as much a physical space as a mental cosa which only comes to life if we believe in it), this gives a magnetic film, fascinating in the reduction that it allows itself to operate on any factitious adventure, fascinating in his art of concentrating on the heart of his obsession. From the top of his balcony, John observes the dancers and hopes to see, between the bodies and their incessant ballet – a ballet that changes imperceptibly, and transports us without our noticing from disco euphoria to techno despair – something that would be worth life, justify it forever. He begins to form a couple with May, but a couple without flesh, ghostly, which prowls in the folds of the night, the eye on the lookout. He never dances, she continues to move but disembodies as the years pass.
Invisible thing that infuses every shot
In James, the character of John Marcher lives in the anguished prescience of a fatal event, the “beast in the jungle” ready to pounce and which ends up devouring him when he least expects it. In the continuity of this troubling reflection, everything happens with Patric Chiha in a change of light, in a reversal of perspective that transfigures the space, in the pose of a partygoer who is suddenly surprised dancing like one is dying. Patric Chiha, precise in his gesture, in each of his framings, is firm where his story is vague, sharp where the evanescence of this invisible thing that infuses each shot threatens. In short, he relies on staging and confidence in what we, spectators, want to imagine when we enter the cinema. That the characters exist and that they age even when they don’t take a wrinkle, that the Berlin wall collapses off-screen, that AIDS empties the dance floor in a fitting. All this without leaving the shimmering hybrids of the club and, like in a David Lynch film, firmly believing in the emotion that passes over faces like an electric current. As the film progresses, the thing unfolds like a shadow, May is eaten away by the darkness and the question is posed to us: and will you believe it until the end? Eyes wide closed, are you going to distinguish, between the thousand flashes of time reflected in the disco ball, anything other than the image of life, a fragment of life itself?
The Beast in the Jungle by Patric Chiha, with Anaïs Demoustier, Tom Mercier, Béatrice Dalle… (1h43).
#Beast #Jungle #lair #dance #Liberation