Ruin, annihilation, beast

Past, present, future

Classicism, contemporaneity

Known and unknown

Visible and invisible

The fear of living and loving
Sophisticated film adaptation of Henry James' novella The Beast in the Jungle

Gabrielle works in advertising, models and has to pretend to see objects on a completely green set.

We find her shortly thereafter in the past where she re-encounters Louis, to whom she had confided something terribly intimate but is now married to a doll maker.

In the future Gabrielle is trying to figure out whether to face the purification of her DNA through which she will become immune to emotions now considered, in the realm of artificial intelligence, a threat.

A disorienting puzzle of cryptic and revealing passages, between different settings, lives, moments, eras: after all, as Gabrielle says, "there will be something beautiful in all this chaos."

Immersed in a tank with a black liquid, she awaits the intervention: an instrument will penetrate her ear and free her emotions, but there is a 0.7 percent that does not respond to the treatment.

In the past, she immerses herself in water together with Louis to escape the fire in the doll factory.

In the present, she lives in a beautiful house not her own that she takes care of while the owners are away and where she babysits; she frequents discos called 1972 or 1980 and finally 1963, whose years refer to the type of music.

Here she is looking for company, but she does not meet boys and when she asks girls to take her in they reject her, calling her a "whore." She wanders among possible friendships, fears, uncontrollable feelings and prescient sites.

He still trusts Gabrielle and wishes Louis, still a virgin at 30, now obsessed with girls' rejections, did as well: he posts videos online recounting his plight and fueling a thirst for revenge.

He feels he doesn't deserve all those no's, he has a nice car, he's a nice guy, and he can't justify and as much as understand why so feminicide is around the corner.

In the past Eros and Thanatos have always been joined by a conjunction, which serves to associate words with each other and is used to coordinate two elements that in the proposition fulfill the same office and are related.

In the present Eros is Thanatos, that is, they coincide and, if Eros which is life drive, love, attraction that drives us toward what we like and provides the motivation to know, plan, act, build, coincides with Thanatos which is death drive, aversion displeasure, desire for destruction and to end here comes that feeling of ruin and annihilation of which Gabrielle speaks.

The future no longer envisions either the coincidence or the conjunction of Eros and Thanatos as complementary forces governing psychic and biological life. It is Thanatos that takes space and becomes a destructive force, the beast felt by Gabrielle, that unknown, unseen sensation, that evil omen that invades her and becomes an uncontrollable fear, dismay, dread and trembling.

Hence the need to nullify as well as others this paralyzing feeling that causes anxiety, panic but above all anguish: the oscillation of human consciousness in the face of nothingness.

What remains, however, Gabrielle knows well when she notices the failure of the euthanasia of feelings and once again meets Louis, handsome, lovable as ever: but something is now irreversible.

The beast has been defeated and with it life.

More than fragments, Bonello's are crazy splinters of an amorous discourse framed by a lens that looks lucidly at the irreversible distortion over which looms the unrepresentable beast of the end: nihilism is past, in front of it there is only nothingness.

03-Sep-2023 by Beatrice