The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

It might fail, but I'm not entirely convinced Pinter was interested in the period relevance of the novel anyway; it's almost as if he respectfully acknowledges Fowles's richness, and thus the extreme difficulty of adapting to a very different medium. The epigraphs in Fowles's novel serve to create a strong sense of the period: the rise of Darwinism against extreme conservativism; themes such as honour and reputation (as you say, the entire plot of Charles losing his inheritance) is placed aside if not discarded altogether in the film, but for me Pinter takes the central, forbidden romance of the novel and places it in contemporary bounds. He does this very well and cleverly, but as it is, even in itself, the film feels awfully truncated and light.

The film-within-a-film device, for me, is more in homage of the novel; a straight adaptation, with visual overlays of text or intertitled cards, or breaking the fourth wall, would seem terribly contrived in a film version: they'd lack the literary wit Fowles invests (effortlessly; the sudden decision to address the reader at the beginning of chapter 13 sends shivers up my spine).

Fowles is my favourite writer; effortlessly walks the tightrope between mysterious modernism and self-conscious post-modernism. The Aristos, an accumulation of his personal philosophies, is a convincing (if you're already converted) call for evolutionally beneficial ways of living. He's a fierce atheist who might acknowledge the lasting relevance of Christianity only allegorically; and his cynicism is always lifted by an undying romanticism.

He's my favourite linguist; he says stuff I want to but never can (as a result, I suppose, of not being very widely read). His introductory summation of a particular character in A Maggot,for instance, had me in fits of giggles: he succinctly gives an example of how this guy - a feigned soldier with a romanticised past - might answer a particular question, and then ends with the line, "In short, an eternal bag of bullshit".

His distance between the contemporary setting in which he inevitably writes and the period setting of which he chooses to write is expertly done, always.


My disdain for book-to-film adaptations has all but worn off, now. All art influences all other art, inevitably and necessarily; an acknowledged adaptation, or even a same-medium remake, is just a more obvious method. That said, a lot of remakes and adaptations are financial cash-ins: any Dan Brown adaptation in the next three years seems guaranteed to make money, for instance.

But it's benificial to approach different mediums with different expectations; to look simply at the common thematic links might fetch an unfair bias towards the written original (I'm not saying you were doing this, or do do this, but a lot of people do). Pictures are worth a thousand words, they say, and so comes the common notion that a thousand words can embrace a particular thematic fabric much better and coherently than an image (I agree on the coherently part); but film has its own ways of working - for me, its formal richness (and not just vehicle for subject matter) is often overlooked.

I'm rambling; again, I wasn't saying you're guilty of any of these prejudices... though you might be, I don't know.

I'll ask you this: why is it, do you think, that this is the case:
?

When you say 'better', though, what do you mean? At telling the story? In broken down terms, say, the opening line of a novel, or a single sentence within it, is inherently more capable at relating information than, say, the opening image of a film, or a single composition found within it?

Do you think it's something to do with conflicting authorship in filmmaking?

A novel is written by one person, but even if a film has one script-writer adapting, there's an inevitable, unavoidable filtering process wherein everybody from the cinematographer to the set designer has a look in and claim on creativity? Look at most shooting scripts (and shooting script is just the last of many drafts) and even they'll differ from the final product.

I find that most examples of the book being better than the film result from comparisons of written text: the novel to the script; the formal technicalities of the new version (its soundtrack, its imagery, its acted out performances) are ignored. I'm not even sure whether they should be compared; of even if they can.

(I'm not playing devil's advocate here, I genuinely don't know. I'd like others to chip in their thoughts.)