Barely 20-year-old May enters a sexually hedonistic, glitzy ’70s club, with revelers rubbing each other in a trance. May still has life ahead of her: she is in a happy relationship at first, her mother and closest friends dance with her at this place, which she visits regularly. May’s door to life is open.
However, she happens to bump into John down there in front of the toilets – her old friend from her youth, who once mysteriously told her that she had a secret and was waiting for something that she was looking for in vain. May is taken with the young man without emotion, almost in love with his secret, the shared waiting and searching that he talks about. But he never wants to dance, wears the same old corduroy jacket forever, just wants to keep an eye out for the “thing in the future” with May.
Where May’s door into life was initially still open, she once laughed, celebrated and indulged in her daydreams with everyone, she decides for John, every Saturday, same time. And at some point even against her marriage to her husband and against her mother, her friends. For the next almost 30 years, May instead sits in the club with John and watches what is happening. Occasionally she seems to have used drugs that she cannot tolerate. What are they waiting for? The viewer can answer that for themselves. In general, the stylistic device “door” plays a major role. Again and again, the entrance is decisive, the bouncer, the “transition” into another time by staying at the entrance and exit. The sentence “The door is open” is also repeated several times.
AIDS, time, codependency: who or what is the “beast”?!
And who is the beast now? Is it the almost awkward, subtly intense codependency between John and May? Is it all the time that goes by, seemingly without being able to harm them? Is it the place that remains Matrix-like for decades, regardless of whether the Wall falls outside, the Twin Towers collapse, AIDS breaks out? (As you can see on the TV, which the bouncer installed in the basement of the club so she can watch the news while she works.)
The only changes that the unnamed party place experiences: No audience, in the years in which AIDS breaks out. In those years, the location is pretty much empty, except for – of course – John and May. This is supposed to reflect how frowned upon and degenerated the techno-heavy, queer party scene was at that time. Otherwise, only the audience changes, their clothes, the music, and at the very end of the film, admission.
The beast could also be what lies between the lines: the Cher-like bouncer and club owner who, for decades, decides who gets admission by eye and gut feeling. In the film, she also comments on what is happening as an omniscient “fairy tale” narrator from the outside.
It could just as easily be the grey-haired man down in the club, sitting in front of the toilets, at a table with a plate on which please pay for every visit to the toilet. You never see him cleaning, just watching and commenting. May, for example, says he has seen a friend stab another friend in the back. His statements are as meaningless as they are pregnant – he could stand for the portal you pay for if you want to “get ahead” in life. Lo and behold: after going to the toilet, John has no coins with him and cannot pay – May meets him there, has coins, paid for both.
The beast could also be “eternal youth”, a mirage of our time, a brain fib: John and May do not change visually in about 30 years, probably to make this aspect clearer. The party scene is, the people are getting younger, the outfits less. And the music! Techno and trance are now booming where seventies sounds once played. Where golden glittering dresses once shimmered, people are suddenly wearing tops and “fast glasses”.
Or is the beast perhaps the use of drugs that keeps stepping into the movie’s ring as another gladiator?
Infinity is an illusion – in the end, death takes everyone
Either way: In the end, May dies seriously ill. Director Patric Chiha catches you cold. As a viewer, you have forgotten (wanted to) or accepted that at some point she really has to be over 50 and leaves John alone because she understood something. And John ends up falling on her grave in despair and weeping. Their connection was loyal “until death parted them”.
At the very latest, anger and resentment set in on the part of the viewer – at everything. To the whole film and what it triggers and reflects on you. All the stupid decisions you’ve already made in life, all the time you’ve invested in the wrong things. The toxic relationship that should have ended way sooner. The life you could have lived instead of letting it pass you by. The youth that is just passing away. At the end of the film, every viewer can decide for themselves what the “beast in the jungle” is. And also what John’s secret may be; that is not revealed and also stays with the viewer.
Classic “French film”, classic Berlinale category “Panorama”: The “Panorama” simply shows films “that are intended to agitate and shake up, that want to challenge the audience’s thinking”. Patric Chiha manages this without haste. Very, very slowly, the viewer goes crazy together with the protagonists.
More about the Berlinale 2023
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