The French Lieutenant's Woman

Rewatched the film, reread Pinter's screenplay. Each time I do -- I've done this many times -- my admiration for each grows. Works of genius, say I. Especially the screenplay.

John Fowles, the novelist of the original, a work of genius in its own right, writes an intro in my edition of the screenplay, which alas is out of print. He shares the difficulty of bringing the novel to film, a book considered "an unfilmable novel," the many writers who failed. Indeed, an admirer of the novel, I gasped when I heard Hollywood had bought it. No way! Here was a novel that was, in part, about writing a novel, that was, in part, a juxtaposition of modern sensibilities against Victorian sensibilities, a very literary book in the best sense. No way can you bring all this to film.

Then I heard Harold Pinter was writing the screenplay. What? What? And he succeeded where everyone else had failed. Fowles himself was delighted.

Pinter made a conceptual leap that in retrospect seems obvious. Creative genius often does. Pinter decided this: the way to adapt a novel about writing a novel is to make a film about making a film. He added a completely new storyline, the "real lives" of the actors in the Victorian story, Fowles' story, and here he could bring in the modern v. Victorian sensibilities and the rest. It all comes together and works beautifully. He even could deliver Fowles' "two endings" -- the intrusive novelist/narrator can't decide on a happy or unhappy ending, so delivers both. Pinter makes the Victorian story end happily, the  modern story end unhappily. Perfect!

This is an example of what is meant by an adaptation being true to the spirit of the original. Even though half the manuscript isn't in the novel at all, here is a perfect adaptation of an "unfilmable book."

And what a joy to return to both for the upteenth time.