CINEMA
Sustenance from fiction
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Transferring the written word to the silver screen is often fraught with problems. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN examines the complexities in the light of a festival of films based on novels by women writers.
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"Persuasion" on screen is no more than a Mills and Boon drama.
THE young woman had an unenviable job. She read fiction, made abstracts, and gave ratings, for easier selection of stories by film companies scouting for screen adaptations. Once she charged extra for the "sheer torture" of ploughing through the pages of a mammoth trilogy — and got the money too!
This was long before she became famous as the author of 84, Charing Cross Road, whose adroit filming was a feat of its kind. But Helene Hanff was right in deeming the voluminous saga she had read as unfit for screen adaptation. It had too many characters, too much fantasy, imagery and description, far too much quaintness for any non-niche digestion... Or so we thought, until Peter Jackson came along and made J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings into a blockbuster.
Making any book into a film is walking into a minefield. Readers are bound to compare the novel with the film, and unfavourably. With "Harry Potter", the slightest tampering would have crucified director Chris Columbus. Deviations from the text, even when justified by convincing results on the screen, upset loyal readers. A serious matter when the chosen text is a beloved classic like Gone with the Wind, or politically explosive material like Malcolm X's autobiography. Not all writers are able to accept the changes dictated by the new medium. In India R.K.Narayan was at his sardonic best in critiquing the misguided "Guide" on the screen, though a triumph for stars Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman. And Sunil Gangopadhyay lifted a quizzical eyebrow over suave Satyajit Ray's version of his Bohemian Days and Nights in the Forest.
Alfred Hitchcock had no penchant for classics or bestsellers. He chose obscure works of fiction, and shaped them into classics and bestsellers of his own — as in "Vertigo" or "Psycho". And though original screenplays offer more freedom than adaptations, filmmakers are unable to resist the lure of literature, especially the successful work of fiction.
In this context the "Novel Scene", British Council's festival of films based on fiction by women writers (October 2003), showcased different approaches to making the word speak through pictures.
Except for Esther Freud's "Hideous Kinky", a Moroccan adventure, the stories had England for location, and between 1810s and 1970s. Yet the films had many things in common — polished performances, extraordinary care for minute details in recreating the period in the sets, skill in weaving outdoor locations into the narrative warp, and finally a feel for character as against the type, and respect for literature, even in the films that didn't work well.
Jane Austen provided the best example of a film that did not work, though it adapted her mature last novel Persuasion. The tale blends Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling myths. Anne Elliot's unperceived beauty and taken-for-granted goodness are rewarded with true love, despite ugly sisters, other snooty barnyard creatures, and a kind but bad counsellor in her mother's best friend Lady Russell. Eight years after rejecting Captain Wentworth as a poor matrimonial prospect, Anne finds him returning a rich and successful man, courted by younger women. How can she make him see she still loves him?
The novel uses these worn motifs to create a subtext of understated feelings. Anne wins her right to happiness only when she shakes off diffidence, trusts her own mind and heart, learns to judge for herself, and to make decisions unhampered by influences no less baleful for being well meant. But Jane Austen's suggestions are not merely feminist though they admit feminist interpretations. Her irony, more damning in genteel verbiage, spares no one, and evades types and caricatures in its painterly shades. Every character rings true, remains contemporary. This is the miniaturist at her best.
The film has magnificent production values. The past is recreated with love. The costumes are a visual treat under lantern and chandelier. Body language and speech are old worldly.
A bizarre and colourful experience in "Hideous Kinky"."
But what we miss is the irony, the cruel jabs of the pen, the internal drama seething under outward placidity. Merely by being visual, uncertainties are no longer uncertain. Too many characters for those who don't know the novel, and all speaking in a forgotten lingo. On the screen "Persuasion"' is no more than a Mills and Boone costume drama.
Worlds apart in style and intent as they were, both Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Meera Syal's Anita and Me were kind to the visual transfer.
Woolf's story is essentially simple. Morning time and fiftyish Clarissa Dalloway, plans an evening party with the Prime Minister among the guests, walks out, orders flowers, mends her dress, supervises maids at work, worries about her daughter's newfound Christian piety, crosses the path of a shell-shocked soldier who commits suicide soon after, receives a visit from her old lover, worries right through the party about its success. All the time the present and the past swirl around her in flashbacks and subplots. In the text the words, meanings, thoughts, feelings and actions overlap like the continual swell-n-slap of waves, with no end, and no beginning.
Director Marleen Gorris draws sustenance from the text, without drowning in the stream-of-consciousness. Vignettes are reproduced intact with slight shifts, which simultaneously make them more transparent, or gain meanings. Empathetic editing enriches, retains the liquid feel of the text.
The sets and locations are exquisite — this is a movie of English flowers, gardens, rivers and parks. But we see how failures, heartbreaks, suicides and betrayals are as real as the fussy costumes, exotic hats, elegant parties and sophisticated chatter under which they lie dormant. The film, like the book, is no chronicle of upper class nostalgia. It is about the pulse of life as it throbs and ebbs around every one of us. Vanessa Redgrave as Clarissa, well supported by others, makes the experience worthwhile.
Anita and Me" _ Kind to the visual transfer.
Unlike "Mrs Dalloway", which retains the complexities of the novel in its own way, "Anita and Me" opts for a simplified screen version. Syal should know;, she was scriptwriter ("Bhaji on the Beach") before turning novelist. There is more sentimentality, not out of place in the chronicle of a Punjabi family in an English mining town, where young Meena encounters racism, perfidy and brutality in unexpected persons, unforeseen moments.
The dynamism comes from the tragicomedy of cross-cultural encounters. The dialogues explode with the plenitude of life. Fears and privations cannot snuff out the hope, or prevent efforts understanding and coming to terms with limitations and alienations.
The film ("The Heart of Me") and the book (Rosamond Lehmann's Whispering Grove) are equally dated. The predictable passion between the wife's (Olivia Williams) sister (Helena Bonham Carter), and brother-in-law (Paul Bettany) ends in tragic irresolutions. There is one moment when Williams loses her icy control and beauty to gasp in naked grief, "What about trust and loyalty?" It hangs in the air, an unconnected wisp.
Esther William's "Hideous Kinky" had Kate Winslet as the mother of two little girls (quite a change from the "Titanic"). They journey through Morocco on a vague pilgrimage for truth, though love comes in the unlikely guise of vagabond Bilal, who comforts them all. The film offers a bizarre and colourful experience without insight, preventing the characters from acquiring dimensions except in fits and spurts.
So what if the reach exceeds the grasp? There was much in the attempt of the five directors who tried to draw sustenance from fiction, to add those dimensions to experiences and characters, which escape the eye.
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