17/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: By way of two characters embedded in a nightclub for over 20 years, Patric Chiha delivers a loose adaptation of Henry James, with immense, strange and thrilling ambition

"With him it’s like I’m stepping outside of everyday life – To go where? – I don’t know. Into genuinely unknown territory." Much like the protagonist in his new film The Beast in the Jungle [+see also:
trailer
interview: Patric Chiha
film profile], which was unveiled in the 73rd Berlinale’s Panorama section, Austrian filmmaker Patric Chiha is drawn to fairly radical experimentation, where extreme focus opens up new perceptive dimensions in a kind of timelessness extolling intensity, as his documentary If It Were Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Patric Chiha
film profile] demonstrated brilliantly in the same selection of the German festival back in 2020. The present movie also revolves around dance, but it’s fictional this time round, since the story of The Beast in the Jungle, a loose adaptation of a Henry James novella, unfurls entirely inside a Parisian nightclub ("you left, what a strange decision! It’s in here that it all goes on"), offering up an incredible existentialist journey at once romantic, euphoric, melancholic and melodramatic, ranging from 1979 to 2004. In this sense, it’s a rather conceptual film on paper, providing a romantic escape from real life, which is vigorously brough to life by the brilliant acting duo Anaïs Demoustier and Tom Mercier.

"Every time she came close to John, she felt a horizon opening up which she could neither understand or name." May is almost 25 years old when she randomly crosses paths with John, whom she’d bumped into ten years earlier at the Sardinade Ball in the Landes region. It was there that he confided in her, sharing his secret: "ever since I was a child, I’ve known that I’ve been chosen for something exceptional, and this extraordinary thing should happen to me sooner or later. And my entire life will be turned upside down." May has friends (Sophie Demeyer, Bachir Tlili) and a lover (Pierre Vischer, who will later become her husband), she takes life by the horns, and she dances. John, meanwhile, is immobile, shy and in a permanent state of observation: he never dances, as if trapped outside of life in this place which is paradoxically outside of time though incredibly energetic. He waits, without knowing what for, but with the absolute certainty that he needs to wait. Drawn irresistibly to one another, and keeping an increasingly minimal distance from physical intimacy, the two characters meet in this location almost every Saturday for years, for a strange and mysterious adventure where love and the abstraction of love interweave to the point of timelessness in a suspended quest for the meaning behind their simple humanity. And this under the analytical eye of the nightclub’s bouncer (Béatrice Dalle) and her accomplice Mr Pipi (Pedro Cabanas), as we travel through different eras and their accompanying atmospheres (birthdays, the election of the Left in 1981, New Year’s parties, the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11…).

This is but a surface-level summary of an extremely ambitious film which is surreptitiously abundant in many respects (visually, musically, philosophically…). An in-depth exploration of the contrast between the fervour (in all its forms) of the dance floor and the aspiration to be more than everyday human life allows, The Beast in the Jungle takes a bold approach and flirts willingly with artificiality, but it’s in its third and final act that the film really takes off, hitting its target as emotions fall away and the veil is finally lifted on the mystery underpinning it all.

Produced by Parisian firm Aurora Films, in co-production with Belgium’s Frakas Productions and Austria’s WILDart Film, The Beast in the Jungle is sold worldwide by Les Films du Losange.

(Translated from French)