Romans français du XIXe siècle à l’écran: Problèmes de l’adaptation (review)

Anne-Marie Baron’s fine study of literary adaptation in the cinema considers the nineteenth-century novel and the cinema as neighbouring arts, as they both have a primarily narrative vocation, and they both aim at a mass, popular audience. It is especially in this insistence that the cinema and the nineteenth-century novel share similar cultural concerns and stylistic and technical innovations that the value of Baron’s study lies. These similarities can be found in levels of critical disdain both films and novels attract as popular forms (‘avant le cinéma, le roman fleuve et le roman feuilleton passent pour l’opium du peuple’, p. 14) and the novels’ use of such ‘cinematic’ devices as melodrama, dark realism, manipulation of narrative time and subjective point-of-view narration. Nineteenth-century novelists, especially Balzac, can therefore be considered ‘cinématographique avant la lettre’ (p. 38). In the historical introduction, Baron notes the almost immediate exploitation of the novels’ contents by early films, such as Albert Capellani’s L’Assommoir (1910). The appeal of the nineteenth-century novel for film makers has not waned: some 18% of contemporary fiction films are based on nineteenth-century novels. Perhaps unsurprisingly given its dominant position in adaptation studies, Baron dedicates most of her theoretical introduction to the thorny issue of fidelity. She traces the various arguments concerning the nature of fidelity (including the idea that infidelity to a source text can function as a commentary) and acknowledges that while ‘le problème a toujours semblé crucial aux amoureux de la littérature, qui trouvaient insupportable l’intrusion des cinéastes dans leur rapport intime et privilégié avec les textes’, one should nevertheless ‘se garder de toute attitude normative’ (p. 33). There follows a lively discussion of an impressively wide range of films based on novels, short stories or autobiographies by Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola. A variety of differing historical periods and cinematic debates are covered, notably the richness of the Vichy period for Balzac adaptations; the vexed question of adaptation for the New Wave; and the late 1990s trend for biographical films of George Sand, whose appeal for contemporary film makers is her dual role of writer and mother which makes her ‘conforme au modèle de la superwoman des années 2000, qui se veut à la fois career-woman, mère de famille et sex symbol’ (p. 60), illustrating the more general point that adaptations speak more to the period in which they are made than the one in which they are set. Baron states that for many, the viewing of a film will precede the reading of a novel, rather than the other way round, and she takes a pragmatic view of the need to take account of this when teaching students nineteenth-century literature. Adaptations can be an ‘atout maître’ (p. 139) in introducing students to the critical study of literature, film and questions of influence and intertextuality. Written in an accessible style with definite pedagogic purpose, this book is especially recommended for undergraduate courses that consider adaptations of nineteenth-century French novels to the cinema screen.