SCREEN
Henry James given a time-tripping spin; island life lessons for a child; an East European border drama; Bigfoot on ’shrooms…
THE BEAST For a story whose whole point is that (spoiler) nothing happens, Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast In The Jungle has proved remarkably fertile for adaptation. Bertrand Bonello’s is the fourth screen version since 2017 and the second this year.
It is, however, by the far the most radical, transplanting James from musty Victorian drawing rooms to the age of AI, incels and reality collapse events.
Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux, stretching her wings after her time as a Bene Gesserit aristocrat in Dune 2) is a young woman in Paris 2044, bored with her role in a society where, following an unspecified catastrophe (“Do you really want to return to the events of 2025?” an ominous, unseen voice asks her) AI has assumed total control. If she wants to be cleared for more interesting work, she has to undergo a procedure called “DNA purification”, whereby painful memories and emotions from prior incarnations are corrected, leaving citizens suitably psychologically neutered to make important civic decisions.
The authorities send Gabrielle back in time, via a kind of hot-tub version of the black pool from Under The Skin, first to Paris 1910, then to Los Angeles in 2014. In all space-times she encounters George MacKay (the war-weary Corporal Schofield from Sam Mendes’ 1917): in her present as Louis, a fellow candidate for purification; in 1910 as a dashing English suitor; then again in 2014 as a furiously vlogging incel, determined to take his revenge on womankind. She encounters repeating, potentially cataclysmic events – in Paris a grand flood, in LA a sudden earthquake. And certain motifs – pigeons, dolls, fortune-tellers, nightclubs – echo down the years.