‘The Beast In The Jungle’: Berlin Review

Dir: Patric Chiha. France/Belgium/Austria. 2023. 104 mins. 

Henry James’s celebrated 1903 novella about one man’s unhealthy preoccupation with a future moment of significance that he believes will define his life is transposed into a Paris nightclub, spanning a 25-year period which starts with disco decadence and ends in industrial techno. Anaïs Demoustier is a sparkling May, the woman who gives up much of her own life to accompany John (a suitably disengaged Tom Mercier, the star of Nadav Lapid’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning Synonyms) as he waits for this mysterious and unspecified seismic incident in his destiny to happen. The extravagant abandon of the dance floor in Austrian director Patric Chiha’s distinctive, if slightly over-long, adaptation only heightens the tragic elements of a story about two people whose lives are wasted in the wait for something better to come along. 

The driving, throbbing soundtrack will be a selling point for many

Part of the point of the story is a kind of paralysis, a passivity that results from never being able to seize the present moment for fear that some more important future event is just around the corner. This results in a film that starts to feel a little repetitive as the ennui kicks in for the ill-fated pair – an ennui that is in service of the story, certainly, but which doesn’t always make for the most dynamic viewing experience. James’s novella has been adapted on several previous occasions, most recently as the Brazilian production A Fera Na Selva in 2017 and The Beast In The Jungle in 2018 from the Netherlands. Bertrand Bonello’s forthcoming The Beast is also very loosely based on the same story. Chiha returns to Berlin, having screened two documentaries in the festival previously, one of which, If It Were Love, won the Teddy in 2020. Following its premiere in Panorama, the film should enjoy festival interest, where it will connect with audiences that appreciate the film’s keen eye for fashion and pop-cultural evolution. 

The film’s club setting, a cavernous space presided over by Béatrice Dalle’s slightly Mephistophelean door person/narrator and a bathroom attendant known as Monsieur Pipi (Pedro Cabanas), is an evocative one. The venue is depicted as a glitter-filled snow globe, sealed off from the rest of the world; from the mediocrity and mundanity of everyday life, certainly, but also from its small triumphs, gentle pleasures and minor milestones. When John and May meet at the club each week, at the point when Saturday night blurs into Sunday morning, time stands still. The Berlin Wall may fall, and the AIDS crisis may tear through the first generation of clubbers, but May and John remain unchanged and ageless. What might seem enviable is a symptom of lives that have been placed on hold, however.

While the two central characters remain fresh-faced, the passing of time is marked in the shifts in the music – the driving, throbbing soundtrack will be a selling point for many – and in the costumes. Or more specifically, in May’s costumes, which are exquisite: a joyful riot of pleasure-seeking, party-crashing sequins and satin. John, meanwhile, spends twenty-five years wearing the same pair of jumbo cord trousers in a purgatorial shade of mushroom brown, and the same beleaguered-looking blazer.

The momentum of the picture, and of the characters’ shared world, slows markedly once May leaves the throng on the dance floor and joins John as a perpetual onlooker. But the message is clear, as they slump on the sofa, oblivious to the smaller joys which are there for the taking while they wait for the extraordinary big thing to happen: perhaps a mediocre life is better than no life at all.