'The Beast in the Jungle': ill-fated adaptation of Henry James' story to Paris clubs

An abstract story corresponds to an abstract film.

This is what the Austrian living in France, Patric Chiha, must have thought with his adaptation of

The Beast in the Jungle,

a formidable story by Henry James (about 50 pages) with hardly any incidents, an emotional labyrinth of enormous density, a sublime reflection on love. and the existence that only in its last lines turns the unspeakable into something concrete.

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Over an indeterminate period of time, but which is assumed to be long—years, decades, perhaps half a lifetime—a man and a woman experience successive encounters from a first approach lodged in the past of the beginning of the story, perhaps ten years ago, of which he remembers little or nothing and she, however, remembers everything.

In that primal approach, he told her that from a young age he was clear that a singular destiny awaited him, “perhaps portentous and terrible”;

that he always sensed that an event would come capable of disrupting her existence, even destroying him.

And around that sensation, that consciousness, both live a story that could never be described as sentimental or friendship, since it goes much further: to the ends of space and time.

Anaïs Demoustier and Tom Mercier, in 'The Beast in the Jungle'.

In her fifth film, and the first released in Spanish cinemas, Chiha has tried to recall the vagueness of James' story, but fails in the prose.

The literature of the New York writer, brilliant and vibrant, enveloping, with a prodigious command of language and the elliptical, finds no correspondence in the director's cinematography, who sets his story almost exclusively in a Parisian nightclub (good idea), in the that the passing of the years is reflected through the evolution of the music that is played, from the disco rhythms of 1979, when the story opens, and until 2001, when it closes, fueled by electronic music.

A time that in James' text was never specified with events, but that in Chiha's approach is punctuated by different political-social events, from the arrival of François Mitterrand to power to the 9/11 attacks, passing through the appearance of AIDS and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Brave and ambitious for wanting to transfer the surely impossible to the screen,

The Beast in the Jungle

is presented through an appropriate spirit of unreality, but also through a staging with excessive medium shots of questionable aesthetics, a sound treatment that It never enhances the images and a strange artistic direction that is intended to be outside of any conventionalism, but that appears to be more possible than unusual.

The introduction of an omniscient narrator, played by Béatrice Dalle, who addresses the viewer directly with her gaze fixed on the camera, does not quite work either.

Housed in a limbo of electronic music, dances and lust that hovers around them, while they only talk and reflect about that something extraordinary to come, about that “crouching beast in the jungle (…) destined to kill him or be killed by "him", the man and woman protagonists are still those people who seem destined to love each other forever and ever, in the manner of Harry and Sally in Rob Reiner's film, who took so long to find each other, although in a metaphysical version .

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There remains, of course, the author's courage to try to delve into the twists and turns of James's story, into his blindness and her wisdom.

A boldness that, due to coincidences of the artistic process and the film distribution market, will coincide in a few weeks with another brave man.

On March 29 , The Beast,

by Bertrand Bonello, is released

, another adaptation of the same story, this time from the science fiction genre.

Then we will return to James, to the beast in the jungle, to love, to desire, to waiting, to determination and a way of getting through life.

The beast in the jungle

Director:

Patric Chiha.

Performers:

Anaïs Demoustier, Tom Mercier, Béatrice Dalle, Martin Bischer. 

Genre:

drama.

France, 2023.

Duration:

103 minutes.

Premiere: March 8.

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