[ARTICLE OF THE MONTH] Anthology of film adaptations of novels

According to a study recently published (Publisher's Association) the adaptation of a novel to the cinema would ensure on average 53% more revenue than an original screenplay. Which ones did we like, which ones did we dislike? Our editors have prepared an anthology of the worst and best film adaptations of novels.

Jack and the mechanics of the heart by Mathias Malzieu

Jack was born on the coldest day in the world. Unfortunately, his heart remained frozen. Madeleine, his adoptive mother, will cobble together a heart from a clock. To be able to live normally, Jack must follow three rules: "first do not touch your needles, secondly your anger you will have to control, and finally never, ever, you must fall in love". During a walk around town, Jack will break the most important of the three rules. He's going to fall in love. As a teenager, Jack will go on a great journey to find the girl he is in love with. Mathias Malzieu's novel is full of poetry. We meet crazy characters and incredible worlds. His prose is very musical: the repetitions, the construction of the sentences, the figures of speech create a melody that gives this novel its unique character. By directing the adaptation of his novel himself, Mathias Malzieu has managed to preserve this universe and this music of his own. The actors (Olivia Ruiz, Jean Rochefort, Grand Corps Malade) interpret their characters to perfection. In short, the film is as successful as the novel!

L'Écume des jours by Boris Vian by Michel Gondry – From poetry to dreams

Probably composed at the very end of the Second World War and published just after (1947), L'Écume des jours did not have the success it deserved. Boris Vian, its author, then 26 years old, is an avant-garde, promised very young to certain death, who despite the absurdities lived, promised himself to live life to the fullest. It features Colin, a young man spoiled by life, beautiful, rich and intelligent, who lacks only one very small thing to be truly fulfilled: love. He meets Chloé and it's love at first sight: very quickly the couple gets married. And that's when things go wrong.
Adapting L'Écume des jours on the big screen is not child's play, which is probably why no one else had done it before. Who else but Michel Gondry could visually transcribe this literary treasure? Boris Vian's novel, which can almost be likened to a fairy tale , offers a unique universe, with living objects and whimsical inventions, such as the pianocktail, very rightly highlighted in Gondry's adaptation. Romain Duris (Colin) and Audrey Tautou (Chloé), form the emblematic (and almost logical) couple; and accompanied by Gad Elmaleh and Omar Sy, among others, they stroll through the dreamlike Paris of Gondry, necessarily timeless. The director has made Boris Vian's creativity modern, and even allows himself to fly over the major redevelopment of the Halles de Paris, in a typically Vianesque vehicle, yet imagined by Gondry.

If the adaptation is a success, it is because the eclectic director (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Be kind, Rewind, but also the clip of I dance the mia of IAM, or that of Like a Rolling Stone of the Rolling Stones) is a big fan of Boris Vian to whom he decides to pay tribute. As readers, our imagination is enlightened by the style of Boris Vian, who takes us into a world where everything is possible. The visual universe is perfectly translated by Gondry: Sartre becomes a burlesque puppet, the nightmare goes to the end of despair. But only two things remain eternal and triumphant: the ineffable happiness of absolute love and of course, jazz…
And if L'Écume des jours fell into oblivion at the time of its release, after the revolts of May 68, it has become the emblematic book of youth: Boris Vian had seen before us the damage of the consumer society to excess. His criticism of the work is respected by the director who stages sequences reminiscent of Modern Times in which man is assimilated to a machine. If work is slavery, it is because we spend too much time trying to "make a living" and then we have too little time left to enjoy it. Gondry highlights the ingenuity of the author in bringing objects to life, while humans are all somewhat dehumanized.  

The insolent modernity of L'Écume des jours allowed Michel Gondry a successful adaptation almost seventy years after the release of Boris Vian's novel.

Paula Hawkins' Train Girl by Tate Taylor

The Girl on the Train is the kind of novel that hooks you from the first pages and keeps you on your toes throughout the story. In this first novel by Paula Hawkins, we discover the miserable existence of Rachel, consumed by alcoholism and memories of her former happy life, which seems far away from her now. His only small pleasure: taking the train and seeing from the window a couple of young people who seem to live a perfect life. The one Rachel would have loved to have. But her gloomy daily life is quickly turned upside down when our heroine no longer sees the young woman of the couple, and is convinced that something terrible has happened to her. However, who would believe a depressed alcoholic like her? The novel, released in 2015, was one of the best-selling literary albums of the year in many countries. Hollywood could not miss the craze around the thriller quickly bought the rights and, a year later, the film adaptation was released on our screens. With a rather honorable cast (Emily Blunt, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans), the film quickly attracted fans of the novel. But what was their disappointment! Awkward lengths, poor dialogues and actors looking lost in the middle of a story that had not been explained to them before. The tense and addictive atmosphere of Hawkins' novel did not survive this adaptation attempt, and watching the film to the end can be akin to masochism. While some literary thriller adaptations have honored the novel (Gone Girl), The Train Girl will be better appreciated in its paper format.

The Lover of Marguerite Duras by Jean-Jacques Annaud – From Homage to Dislove

Born in 1914 in the province of Gia Định in Vietnam, Marguerite Donnadieu (known by the pen name Marguerite Duras) is a French writer, playwright, screenwriter and director. She took part in the New Novel movement, which rejected the idea (considered outdated) of plot, psychological portrait or even necessity of the characters; and which will precede the movement of the New Wave in cinema.
Revealed in 1950 by Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique (already autobiographical in inspiration, the novel received only a mixed reception), Marguerite Duras is known worldwide thanks to L'Amant (1984), a critical and public success as soon as it was published: it earned its author the Prix Goncourt the year of its publication and the Ritz-Paris-Hemingway Prize in 1986. Described as autofiction, this autobiographical novel traces Duras' youth in French Indochina, alongside his mother (a venal teacher who nourishes for her daughter a half-hearted love), his brothers Pierre (the favorite, brutal and domineering) and Paul (the fragile and shy child, who will die young). With sensual and sexual exploration taking centre stage (the "child" has ambiguous relationships with his brothers and seems troubled by his comrade Hélène Lagonelle), the novel evokes the pivotal period of Duras' first sexual and romantic experience with a wealthy Chinese heir, a real provocation vis-à-vis the social, economic and cultural conventions of Indochina in the 1930s.
A first-person narrative focusing on feelings and psychological exploration, the significant episodes are transcribed (at first glance) without logical order or concern to respect the chronology of events. This novel includes all the characteristic elements of Duras' singular writing: destructuring sentences, characters, space and time, waiting, sensuality and alcohol… The author does not seem to bother with the "trivial" details of her story such as the accuracy of dates, names or places. This has the effect of giving the whole a timeless and vaporous aura, a moment of life outside space and time, wrapped in the melancholy of memory.
In 1987, Claude Berri asked his friend Jean-Jacques Annaud to direct the film adaptation. The filmmaker prefers to refuse the offer following his harmonious collaboration with Umberto Eco, convinced that it is impossible to maintain such an agreement with the reputed very difficult Marguerite Duras. The sequel will unfortunately prove him right. Accustomed to initiatory stories in settings that he exploits as separate characters (The War of Fire (1981), The Name of the Rose (1986), The Bear (1988)), he ends up accepting, too tempted by the idea of treating a feminine story in a setting as exotic as colonial France (an environment already exploited in La Victoire en Chantant). The heated discussions with the author, the discovery of the Vietnamese landscape and the testimonies of the survivors of the time allow Annaud to forge his own vision of history, in contradiction with the memories, by definition very personal, of Duras. For the sake of readability and understanding for the viewer, Annaud transcribes the disjointed narrative and the inner discourse into a story with clearer temporality and clarified purpose, notably through the voice-over (Jeanne Moreau, Duras' former friend, accepts knowing that the author would be unhappy) establishing a bridge between the narrator's past and present.
The sensual and carnal film reveals the young Jane March (Eurasian model spotted on a cover of Seventeen magazine when she was only 19 years old) facing an already recognized Tony Leung Ka-Fai. The adaptation was an immediate success: the work was nominated for the Nippon Akademī-shō, the Césars and the Oscars in 1993, and won the César for best original music thanks to the compositions of Gabriel Yared. The story of love and sex between the girl and the Chinese became a common thread and the bitter dimension of the past evoked in a much less idyllic present totally discarded, the film is both a transcription betraying the original text. Not surprisingly, Duras hates the fruit of Annaud's work, claiming that the film adaptation does not capture the real message of the story, the film having in common with the original work only the title. Title that she hastens to change during the republication of the novel in 1991 which becomes The Lover of North China : this version is actually a rewrite, a kind of script of the film that she would have liked to see on the screen. This new book is also an opportunity to deepen elements evoked in the Dam or The Lover : the incest consummated with his brother Paul and the prostitution of Hélène Lagonelle are now established.

A modern and provocative work marked by the author's particular style that shakes up the codes of literary, theatrical and cinematographic narration, L'Amant is a story of introspection that alternately takes on the air of a family drama and then a chronicle of adolescent emotions. A novel with multiple aspects and plural subjects, the story focuses on a crucial period in the author's personal construction as an artist and as a woman. Oscillating between fictionalized autofiction and confession written on paper, L'Amant participates in the writing of the myth of Duras by Duras, a work difficult if not impossible to adapt on the big screen as the words and their ambiguity participate in the aura of mystery that surrounds the author and her work.

The Shining by Stephen King covered by Stanley Kubrick

The Shining, adapted into a film by the Stanley Kubrick monument, has become one of the most recognized horror films on the planet. When in 1980 Kubrick obtained the rights from the publishing house to adapt this book (Kubrick's great specialty), King decided to work with him. Kubrick being quite determined and tyrannical, still wanted to create his own interpretation, which resulted in the film you have probably all seen before.
So finally, what about the popular adaptation when you know the original story?
Starting with the one who has more than anything the right to give his opinion: King himself. As you can hear in the clip below, King hated the adaptation of his characters. He thinks (and we thought the same with Just Focus) that they totally hijack the course of the story. Jack is introduced as the main character of the film while the protagonist is supposed to be Danny (totally erased from the film). He also believes that the Wendy of the film is the "most misogynistic character that can exist".

Indeed, in the book Wendy is always very present for her family and is presented as a mentally strong woman, who must both manage the alcoholism and excesses of her husband as well as the ailments of her son and his intellectual precocity.
On the other hand, Danny is still supposed to be the central character of this story. He owns "The Shining". By the way, the book is called "The Shining, the child of light".
In short, as you will have understood, Kubrick has totally reworked in his own way the way of seeing the characters and interpreting their importance within the story.
In addition, the story itself has undergone some changes, although the scenes have been quite well reproduced, such as the whole end when Jack is locked in the cold room etc…
The scenes where Danny goes to the doctor have all been omitted (normal, Danny no longer matters in the film), or the scenes where Jack investigates the hotel. Another important or even central element that has been forgotten: the boiler of the Overlook hotel (we will let you go and discover this for yourselves).
If you are interested in the interpretation of Kubrick's film, we invite you to watch the documentary Room 237 which traces the history of the film.

As always we await your feedback, your advice and your reading. In your opinion, what adaptations have been successes, or on the contrary, failures?