By Gerald Peary

Who would predict that this perfectly calibrated tale would be yanked out of its early 20th-century setting and become dystopian science fiction?

The Beast, directed by Bertrand Bonello. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre, AMC Boston Common 19, and other movie houses around New England.

A scene from The Beast featuring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay.

Despite Henry James’s reputation for the extreme difficulty of his prose, a handful of decent and intelligent films have been managed from his fiction: among them, William Wyler’s The Heiress, Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, James Ivory’s The Europeans, and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. So I had hopes for Bertrand Bonello, a French filmmaker of some reputation (Nocturama, Coma), taking on the challenge of James’s rich and exquisite short story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” But with both his direction and screenplay of The Beast, Bonello alters James’s tale in every disrespectful way. He shamelessly distorts it, he corrupts it, and finally he abandons it completely for his own crazy, silly, 100 percent non-Jamesian narrative.

Those who wish to see a film leading to James’s masterly epiphanic ending will be gravely disappointed. The Beast never gets there. Who would predict that this perfectly calibrated tale would be yanked out of its early 20th-century setting and become dystopian science fiction? That in the modern retelling, someone is murdered with a gun? “The Beast in the Jungle” has been betrayed. “The Beast in the Jungle” has sprung… a leak.

Shall we recall James’s 1903 story? It concerns a John Marcher whose life has stopped dead in its tracks because he carries with him a fearful intuition: “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible.… Something or other lay in wait for him … amidst the twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle.” Marcher feels he can do nothing but mark time until this something, whatever it is, happens to him. Along the way, he takes into his confidence a young woman, May Barton, and she becomes his enabler. She waits too.

Both these people remain without partners. It would seem sensible that they become attached, that Marcher make a proposal. But “…marrying was out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share.”

The years pass, the two are so tight. But Marcher shuts May Barton out of any romance; he’s concentrated on the Beast making its move.

The Beast, the movie, starts, in our PC era, with a not-unexpected gender switch. Marcher becomes a woman, Gabrielle, and it’s she who’s so tormented about the Beast in the Jungle. And its Louis, a young man, who becomes the confidante. OK, that’s acceptable, I guess, especially since Gabrielle is played to the hilt by France’s electric star Léa Seydoux. (George MacKay is a thin, dull Louis.) But quickly Bonello’s film veers away from James’s story in unconscionable ways. The Beast is wonderfully vague and elusive in James; it’s genuinely weird and neurotic that Marcher is so paralyzed by it. In the film, the Beast is demystified, made pedestrian and specific. Gabrielle is afraid that some supernatural monster will kill her. Yet that fear doesn’t paralyze her as it does James’s Marcher. It doesn’t stop her from planning a career as a pianist, falling in love and getting married (the opposite of James’s chaste and sexually frigid world), and then succumbing to love a second time with Louis.

At what point does one stop fretting about the violations to “The Beast in the Jungle” and start looking at The Beast as its own filmic story? What we are handed instead of the archaic literary world of Henry James is a trendy, post-modernist jump through time and space: from 1910, to 2014, to 2044, and not always in that order. If James’s story is for mature, educated, and very patient readers, then Bondello’s movie is aimed at a hipster younger film audience who thrives on clever editing and shuffled time sequences and doesn’t demand either narrative or thematic coherence. Most of this film consists of totally random sequences that Bondello concocted in his head, decided would be fun to shoot, and logic be damned. So in 1910, he has Gabrielle’s husband be, for no specific reason, a doll manufacturer, and, also for no reason, there is a long scene in which his factory is toured. Also, there’s the Paris flood of 1910, allowing for a special-effects sequence with the doll factory on fire and our two protagonists, Gabrielle and Louis, trying to swim underwater for safety.

And in 2014 and 2044? A menacing doll makes an appearance and there’s a human-like robot doll who kisses the future Gabrielle. And there are scenes in discos, and a deer walks down an urban street, and a future Louis is a 30-year-old virgin and a woman-hating potential killer, and AI has taken over the world and is messing with everyone’s DNA, and the future Gabrielle works as a model but would like to be an actress, and so on and so on, whatever whatever. There are film critics whose reviews show that they’ve had a good time at The Beast, just going along with whatever Bondello delivers. Obviously, I am not one of them. Old school me, I want my Henry James.

Gerald Peary is a Professor Emeritus at Suffolk University, Boston; ex-curator of the Boston University Cinematheque. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema; writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty; and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess. His latest feature documentary, The Rabbi Goes West, co-directed by Amy Geller, has played at film festivals around the world.