Sex, Guns, and Death: Deborah Warner's Adaptation of The Last September

The title of Elizabeth Bowen's 1929 novel The Last September denotes the end of an age of political innocence, or perhaps more correctly, of political insouciance: the last days in which the Anglo-Irish rule of Ireland could be conducted with colonial hauteur. The novel carries considerable authority, as Bowen herself grew up in Big House society in County Cork, and was twenty-one years old—or young, like her protagonist Lois Farquar—in 1920, the year in which the novel takes place. Director Deborah Warner 1999 film adaptation of the novel, though commercially unsuccessful, also merits critical attention for several reasons. Beautifully filmed by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, its star cast, including Maggie Smith, Fiona Shaw, and Michael Gambon, is supplemented by the brilliant newcomer Keeley Hawes in the lead role. The film also treats Anglo-Irish nonchalance with the right degree of dry irony, thanks to a polished screenplay by novelist John Banville.

In addition, Warner and Banville's adaptation of the novel raises important questions regarding the politics of Irish history in film. Warner and Banville restructure the plot and add a new story line, giving credence to film theorist Brian McFarlane's distinction between plot and story. McFarlane defines "story" as the basic succession of events, while plot is "the distinctive way in which story is made strange, creatively deformed and defamiliarized." ¹ In other words, plot is the individual narrator's interpretation of the base material, and it goes without saying that every narrator sees and tells a story in his or her own way. McFarlane stresses, in the first chapter of Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996), that adaptations are always also originals, and thus need to be judged by the filmmaker's intentions regarding fidelity or nonfidelity to the original, rather than by a dogged insistence that the film reproduce the novel verbatim. The latter is something a film cannot do, because film and literature involve two different "systems of signification," one verbal and therefore symbolic, the other visual and therefore perceptual. ²

Given that an adaptation is entitled to be an interpretation—rather than a mere imitation or a repackaging in a different form—what is left to talk about, when considering the film against the literary work on which it is based? The answer is, much that is of interest: how and why the changes occurred, and the ways in which these changes reflect the different political and artistic climates of the times in which the novel and the film, respectively, were made. The power of the political moment carries an enormous capacity to shape an adaptation. Consider Francis Ford Coppola's remake of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as Apocalypse Now (1979), produced and released during the throes of post-Vietnam War angst. Convinced of the relevance of Marlow's search for the evil depths of man in conditions of early twentieth-century colonial conquest, Coppola shifted this quest to his own time and place, and had Martin Sheen play a Marlow figure, Captain Willard, who was fascinated by the colonialism of war and by what happens when war anesthetizes men to their own values. Issues of colonialism, and of evil, have been problematized by the intellectual and political developments of the twentieth century, including postcolonial theory. Freud popularized the concept of ambivalence, an emotional state well acted by Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Homi Bhabha applied Freudian ambivalence to relations of colonizer and colonized. Bhabhaian ambivalence pervades Warner and Banville's film; for instance, the uncertain identity of her Anglo-Irish uncle and aunt are only magnified in the central character Lois because of her adolescence. They give her no strong role models, neither for political convictions nor for tolerance, her uncle going so far as to order her British soldier boyfriend to kill her IRA lover because "that seems to be the way to take care of it." ³

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In Warner's adaptation of The Last September, certain of what Barthes termed "cardinal functions" were changed, and these changes affect the political...