‘The Beast in the Jungle’ Review: Anaïs Demoustier and Tom Mercier in a Stylish But Listless Adaptation of Henry James

Sheri Linden
·5 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

How do you translate a story about inertia to the screen? And how do you do that when the source material belongs to one of English literature’s most astute chroniclers of the human psyche, in all its intricate mystery? In the case of The Beast in the Jungle, “freely adapted” from Henry James’ 1903 novella of the same name, Austrian filmmaker Patric Chiha has taken a bold creative leap. To tell the story of May Bertram and John Marcher, acquaintances who become soulmates in a strange waiting game, he moves the drama from the rarefied realm of high society to a nightclub in 20th century Paris. The action, to use the term loosely, takes place over 25 years. And it feels like it.

The problem with this version of May and John’s story, scripted by Chiha, Axelle Ropert and Jihane Chouaib, and filmed in Brussels and Vienna, isn’t the gaps in logic or that it prioritizes atmosphere — evocatively realized — over conventional narrative, but that it remains resolutely theoretical and uninvolving.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

As the duo who put much of life on hold in anticipation of something momentous, Anaïs Demoustier (Anaïs in Love) and John (Tom Mercier, Synonyms) feel like stand-ins for ideas rather than people. When they arrive separately at the 1979 opening night of a nameless club, the gatekeeper (Béatrice Dalle, who toplined the director’s first feature, Domain) grants them both entry, for different reasons, and even though she foresees trouble for May in particular. She calls herself the Physiognomist — reading faces is her vocation — and she provides the film’s occasional voiceover narration, as well as an enigmatic smile and, in her hooded cape, a suggestion of the grim reaper.

May, in red lipstick and pencil mustache, arrives with her boyfriend, Pierre (Martin Vischer), and their platinum-blond friend Alice (Sophie Demeyer) and hits the dance floor. But her exuberant partying is interrupted when she recognizes a figure on the balcony, and is drawn to the solitary young man like someone chasing her destiny. She has to remind John not only that they met 10 years earlier, but that he shared his most intimate secret with her. It was at the Sardinade village festival in Landes — a memory well captured, sans dialogue, in the opening-credits sequence, where the younger John and May sit in the bleachers while nearly everyone else dances, a signal of things to come.

John’s secret is that he knows something extraordinary will happen to him — something so extraordinary that nothing matters but waiting for it — not dancing, not kissing, and certainly not joining the group Alice has corralled for a middle-of-the-night drive to Deauville for oysters. A self-described misfit whose briefly glimpsed apartment contains little more than a mattress and some cartons and whose work is “nothing interesting,” John is an act of self-erasure and disconnection, and Mercier fearlessly goes all in on his rigidity. “Are you asocial or just lonely?” May asks him at one point, claiming the difference will affect whether people like him, but I’m not sure the audience would care one way or the other.

Incomprehensibly intrigued by his secret, May agrees to John’s urgent request to “stand watch with me until the thing happens.” The club is where they do the watching and waiting, its glamour-tinged scene an addiction, a holding pattern, even as the style of dress or undress changes over the eras. The years pass, with the Physiognomist and the sardonic bathroom attendant (Pedro Cabanas) observing the comings and goings, and the screenplay marking the time with nods to landmark events: the election of Mitterand, the devastation of AIDS, the Sept. 11 attacks. The only affecting line in the film is also a date marker, delivered by Dalle when her character announces with quiet sorrow, “Klaus Nomi is dead.”

Her mourning for a true one-off performer speaks to the subculture that the club represents, with its fluid range of gender expression and sexuality. This is where Chiha succeeds, in bringing to life the communal energy that frames the film. Céline Bozon’s camera glides over the writhing, celebrating bodies, the dancing throng a kind of complex organism, in sync with the pulsing metronome of the music.

The people on that dance floor are essential to the film, and, unlike the central duo, riveting. May, at first, is one of them, posing for (pre-smartphone) flashbulb photos and fully in tune with the theatrical self-invention that infuses the club. Her sartorial fabulosity never dims, Demoustier confidently pulling off her rich girl’s succession of glamour gowns (Claire Dubien designed the striking finery). When asked by the club’s cloakroom attendant, Céline (Mara Taquin), where she buys her dresses, May claims, in the movie’s funniest expression of ennui, not to remember.

May attaches romantic notions of creativity to John’s secret, as if vagueness equals magic. For the viewer, though, their shared adventure is clearly a delusion every step of the way. Pierre grows understandably fed up with May’s devotion to John, but other than that there’s no sense of her life outside the club. With a narrative so hermetic and devoid of tension or suspense, the destined thing at its center just lies there. It couldn’t be truer that life will pass you by if you spend your days waiting for it to begin, but the operative metaphor in Chiha’s Beast grows thinner and more wearying as the story proceeds. In ways both intended and not, the irony is off the charts, early in the story, when May declares, “I love it when life is like a novel.” Sometimes you might find yourself wishing that a movie was more like one too.

Click here to read the full article.