The new The beast in the jungle by Henry James has undergone many adaptations and interpretations over time. First by François Truffaut, who was inspired by it for his film The green room (1978). Then, by Marguerite Duras, who adapted it for the boards in 1962 and 1981.
After the Dutch Clara van Gool in 2019 and the Austrian Patric Chiha in 2023, it is the turn of French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello to bring this flagship work – a sentimental tragedy addressing opportunities missed for fear of love – to the big screen, in a bursting and ambitious proposition that crosses eras and genres without ever losing sight of its subject.
In 2044, in a world governed by artificial intelligence, where emotions and affects are considered obstacles to happiness and productivity, humans are invited to undergo a treatment which will cleanse them of the traumas accumulated during previous lives .
Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), a young Parisian who is looking to get a better job, decides to undergo these purification sessions. Immersed in a black bath, she has a liquid injected into her ear which allows her to revisit all the incarnations of her relationship with Louis (George MacKay); a love damaged by fear and regret, which manifested itself in all kinds of forms, but always with a tragic conclusion, during three different eras.
The young woman was first catapulted in 1910, during a Belle Époque marked by the great flood of the Seine. During a social evening, the bourgeois woman, a pianist in her spare time and married to a good but boring man, meets Louis. She tells him of the distressing presentiment that torments her, that of an imminent catastrophe that she cannot identify. The story then navigates to 2014, where Gabrielle, an actress who is slow to break through, guards the house of a rich owner in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Louis will take the form of an involuntary bachelor determined to take revenge. In the present, in 2044, the young man still haunts her, while he hesitates to undergo the same treatment as her.
A completed form
The beast – work produced in particular by Xavier Dolan — sees Bertrand Bonello reach heights in risk-taking. Ambitious and accomplished on a formal level, the film multiplies the borrowings from genre cinema to characterize and offer a unique atmosphere to each of the eras staged, brilliantly pastiching the codes of Victorian melodrama, of the film of slasher and science fiction. Cinephiles will also recognize strong references to concepts linked to memory, consciousness and romantic obsession present in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Head full of sun2004) by Michel Gondry — minus the emotional intelligence — as well as in Blue Velvet (1986) or even Mulholland Drive (2001) by David Lynch.
Despite the jumps in time and changes of scenery, the filmmaker keeps his gaze fixed on his heroine, the mysterious Gabrielle, who, thanks to the masterful acting of Léa Seydoux, retains her uniqueness and coherence, even if her modes of thought and the manifestation of one’s feeling of love appear differently depending on the context in which they take shape.
Although we are not easily won over by the romantic aspect of the scenario – the various incarnations of the couple do not all have the same credibility – we can only applaud the depth with which the director explores love, and above all the fear which prevents it from happening, from a philosophical perspective, voluntarily keeping the spectator at a distance by maintaining a feeling of strangeness and bewitchment which perfectly reflects these contradictory emotions. A brilliant exercise in style.