On Chesil Beach

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.”

 

Nothing demonstrates what a cumbersome and ultimately fragile medium the motion picture is more than an adaptation of a good novel – in this case Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2017). It was the last of three projects to adapt the novel to film, starting in 2010 with Sam Mendes, who had bigger fish to fry (Skyfall), then it was passed on to Mike Newell, until the backers backed out. Finally, in 2016, Dominic Cooke, who is an experienced theater director, took it on as his first film.

McEwan wrote the script for the film, the first time since he adapted The Innocent in 1993. At just 166 pages (40,000 words), On Chesil Beach is a slight novel, so its fleshing out presented McEwan with an opportunity to revisit his material and even make some additions. A great deal more is made, for instance, of Edward’s mother (Anne-Marie Duff) in the film, and Florence’s therapeutic effect on her. And I liked how Florence gets Edward to admit, as he's moving his hand up her skirt, that he’s a virgin, too. Trouble is, it probably made her even more afraid of what was coming.

If anything, the horrible anti-climax that occupies the center of McEwan’s novel is all the more ghastly in the film. Watching two people, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting (Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan), who are hopelessly ill-prepared on their wedding night, doing – or attempting to do – what is expected of them should’ve seemed a much more crushing attack on English society of 1962, and a punishing reminder of its failure to prepare two impeccably educated 22-year-olds for the facts of life. McEwan supplied us with what was going on inside their heads, and it definitely helped to explain the somewhat predictable disaster that ensues (for her sake he had refrained from masturbating a few weeks prior, but then she takes his penis in her hand to guide it and - -!). But to watch it unfold without knowing how much she is repulsed by everything about it, which partly explains her hysterical revulsion at being covered in his ejaculate (well, only her thigh in the film – in the novel it reaches her chin), is both shocking and outrageous.

McEwan sets up the tragic moment beautifully. Edward:

For over a year, Edward had been mesmerised by the prospect that on the evening of a given date in July the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman.

Then Florence:

Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned towards a close embrace - she preferred no other term -her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat. In a modern, forward-looking handbook that was supposed to be helpful to young brides, with its cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations, she came across certain phrases or words that almost made her gag: mucous membrane, and the sinister and glistening glans. Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he enters her . . . or, now at last he enters her, and, happily, soon after he has entered her . . . Was she obliged on the night to transform herself for Edward into a kind of portal or drawing room through which he might process? Almost as frequent was a word that suggested to her nothing but pain, flesh parted before a knife: penetration.

In the novel, time shifts are handled deftly and carry the reader back and forth from the wedding night scene to Edward’s and Florence’s childhoods and courtship. In the film the transitions are, if anything, too resplendent: one comes away convinced these two brilliant people deserved so much more than what they got. 

Both McEwan and Dominic Cooke, who was a novice at film directing, complained about the loss of control. While McEwan, writing the screenplay, knew that film was collaborative, he missed “playing God” and controlling everything himself. Cooke, who came from the theater, disliked having to contend with the input of so many others – mostly producers, who were eager to suggest ways of simplifying what he wanted to be complex.

Finally, where the film spoils the novel, not to mention Edward and Florence’s wedding night, is in the sex itself, fleeting though it is. (And the trouble starts with Edward’s tongue-kisses, which – evidently – neither actor was up to.) While McEwan could present to us the physical details without fear of obscenity: “She found his testicles first and, not at all afraid now, she curled her fingers softly round this extraordinary bristling item she had seen in different forms on dogs and horses, but had never quite believed could fit comfortably on adult humans. Drawing her fingers across its underside, she arrived at the base of his penis, which she held with extreme care, for she had no idea how sensitive or robust it was. She trailed her fingers along its length, noting with interest its silky texture, right to the tip, which she lightly stroked; and then, amazed by her own boldness, she moved back down a little, to take his penis firmly, about halfway along, and pulled it downwards, a slight adjustment, until she felt it just touching her labia”, the only thing that Dominic Cooke or his two actors could give us is a pantomime, and some other whitish substance standing in for Edward’s spilled seed on Florence’s inner thigh. As written, the scene presented difficulties for a 21st century filmmaker because it all takes place in the cramped space between Edward and Florence’s genitals. But leaving the crucial moment to our imaginations, when everything else in the film is strenuously explicit, was, I think, a mistake. It even reinforces the enforced ignorance about sex that got McEwan’s honeymooners in such a mess. Maybe Michael Winterbottom might’ve been up for the challenge. Or maybe not. And you can’t blame the literalness of film. As Charles Thomas Samuels wrote ages ago, “Sex needs words in order to be creative.”

As for the rest of the film, which is a long denouement in the novel, it was fine all the way up to the concert scene at the end in which Florence receives an ovation in her cherished Wigmore Hall and looks directly at Edward, who sits there and weeps. Movie makeup has made considerable advances in a hundred years, but they didn’t prepare me for the aged masks of Florence and Edward in that final shot, which were embarrassingly bad. They wanted a more conclusive conclusion than McEwan’s (in the novel, they never see each other again after the scene at night on Chesil Beach), but I could’ve done without it. (I especially could've done without learning that Florence had married that fucking cellist!) I prefer to remember them as Edward does:

Occasionally, he would come to a forking of the paths deep in a beech wood and idly think that this was when she must have paused to consult her map that morning in August, and he would imagine her vividly, only a few feet and forty years away, intent on finding him.

McEwan was echoing Philip Larkin, and not just “Annus Mirabilis”. Dominic Cooke told an interviewer that, if there is a lesson to be learned from the story, it is to never look back.

 

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

 

(“Reference Back” by Philip Larkin)

 

The Other Browning Version

“God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”

 

Ten years ago on this blog I compared the two film adaptations of Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, Anthony Asquith’s from 1951 and Mike Figgis’s from 1994.(1) While Asquith’s film has the distinction of preserving for the ages the magisterial performance of Michael Redgrave as Andrew Crocker-Harris, Figgis’s film rehabilitates the role of Crocker-Harris’s wife, Millie (Figgis renamed her Laura).

Looking for a streaming source for the Mike Figgis version, I chanced upon yet another Browning Version, aired on the BBC in 1985, with Ian Holm playing Crocker-Harris and Judi Dench playing Millie.(2) While it isn’t quite a film, but much more of a filmed play (the script is attributed to Rattigan, who in ‘85 had been dead for eight years), it has the advantage of getting us much closer to the actors – and getting close to Ian Holm and Judi Dench is always rewarding.

I am indebted to PBS, America’s public television, for honing my television tastes throughout the 1970s. Much of the programming was imported from the UK and presented weekly on shows like Masterpiece Theater. What I wrote about that show six years ago on this blog bears repeating:

Long ago critics started using the words "masterpiece theater" as a pejorative term, implying that certain films had been subjected to such high-minded treatment that they were stuffy, plodding, or - to use the ultimate dirty word - literary. I wondered how many of those critics had ever actually watched Masterpiece Theater or ever watched PBS for that matter? If they had, they might have discovered just how dangerous it was to use such a term, since the show, which aired out of WGBH Boston, could be some of the most challenging television around.

Once the action of this BBC Browning Version was underway, my initial response was surprise at seeing a strapping young man (Stephen Mackintosh) playing the schoolboy John Taplow. In the better-known film versions he was played by pubescent – and rather inadequate – boys. Stephen Mackintosh was 18 when the BBC filmed the program, set entirely in the Crocker-Harris’s drawing room. To some, Mackintosh may seem rather old for a boy in the Lower 5^th form, but in English boarding schools the 6^th form is the senior year, so Taplow’s age would’ve been about 16.

The one-act play is quite familiar to me now: Andrew Crocker-Harris is a boarding school schoolmaster at what the British call public school, but which is exclusively private, teaching Greek and Latin. He is so unpopular among his students, past and present, that he has been called by them the “Croc” and the “Himmler of the Lower 5th.” The reason for such “soulless petty tyranny” becomes clear when we meet his wife, Millie, who treats him with open disdain and is carrying on an affair with Frank Hunter, the science master of the Upper 5^th form. One of Crocker-Harris’s students, named John Taplow, confesses to Frank that he feels sympathy for the Croc. His sympathy inspires him to buy the Croc a parting gift – a copy of Robert Browning’s verse translation of the Agamemnon. Inside it he writes, in Greek, “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.” The gift of the book and the inscription is so unexpected that Crocker-Harris is overcome with emotion. It is the climax of the play and the three actors I’ve seen perform the role of Crocker-Harris make it exceptionally moving.

The only thing that prevented Ian Holm, who died last June at 88, from being as famous a stage and screen presence as, for instance, Anthony Hopkins, was his size. He was just shy of 5’5”. He was consigned to supporting roles for decades, yet in film after film his presence is unforgettable: The Return of the Soldier, Dreamchild, The Madness of King George, The Sweet Hereafter, Joe Gould’s Secret. As Crocker-Harris, Holm is refreshingly steady rather than doddering. Michael Redgrave portrayed him as a kind of cipher – a walking shadow, to which his nightmare marriage had reduced him. Albert Finney tried to make him more sensitive (more sympathetic), but his performance lacked a cohesive center. This may have been due to the transformation of Millie (renamed Laura) into a more sympathetic, if complex, unfaithful wife. The drama becomes more nuanced because of this shift in the balance, and it makes for a more satisfying conclusion. For the Asquith film Rattigan wrote a climactic scene in which Crocker-Harris apologizes to the assembled student body for “having let [them] down.” Figgis includes the scene as well, but since the play is presented intact in the BBC production, the climax lacks the sheer spectacle of the film versions, but is more subtle and quite consistent with the rest of the play. Crocker-Harris simply tells Millie, “I don’t think either of us has the right to expect anything further from the other.” I could almost hear the slamming of a door.

This is where the three Browning Versions stand or fall – on the character of Crocker-Harris’s wife. Rattigan made her into a monster who not only cheats on her husband but who informs him of the progress of her cheating. She throws herself at another schoolmaster (not the first, we discover), whose response to her has cooled when the film opens. It was Rattigan’s way of exposing the rotten core of middle class English respectability, and that cruelty lies just beneath its smooth surface. Millie may have had her reasons for going astray, but Rattigan clearly wanted us to believe that it is Andrew who is more sinned against than sinned. Millie witnessed the erosion of Andrew’s spirit. When Hunter mentions the “soul-destroying Lower Fifth,” Andrew insists that his soul wasn’t destroyed. The generous gesture of Taplow, the copy of Browning’s translation of the Agamemnon, arouses him from what turned out to be a hibernation of the soul.

Ian Holm doesn’t fill his performance with “business” the way Redgrave did. He isn’t fidgety or subject to nervous tics. Nor is he dodgy with his accent, as Finney was. Finney spoke in an affected, refined accent. Holm is at home with his attuned,  enunciated lines because a classics teacher would be pedantic about such things.

Enter Judi Dench, who is a tigress. She not only fills out the role of Millie, contributing depths to the character previously unseen, but also – at last – believability for her cruelty to Crocker-Harris. In her first scene with Michael Kitchen, who plays Upper Fifth master Frank Hunter, she practically chases him around the room. What she doesn’t know is that he’s suffering an attack of conscience and is planning to use Crocker-Harris’s – and Millie’s – imminent departure from the school as a good excuse to break things off with her.

Everything about the production is as near to perfection as it could get. The settings, costumes, and the direction are superb. The director, Michael Simpson, had extensive experience in the theater, and he handles the pacing splendidly. But what we are left with at the play’s conclusion is the image of Millie serving Crocker-Harris his dinner, a domestic scene between a Clytemnestra who has failed to destroy her Agamemnon, reduced to a housewife offering a dinner plate to her husband.

(1) The Browning Versions

(2) There is one more Browning Version, made for American television in 1959, with John Gielgud as Crocker-Harris and a young Robert Stephens playing Taplow. It was directed by John Frankenheimer.

The End of the Record

[If there is a single element that I look forward to in an Irish story, besides the marvelous language, I would call it magic. Sean O'Faolain was one of the first great Irish writers who didn't become an exile from Ireland. I first encountered his stories in my twenties and I read every one I could find. This one, "The End of the Record," is especially short and especially strange. And with it I wish you all a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.] 

The news went around the poorhouse that there was a man with a recording van in the grounds. He was picking up old stories and songs.

‘And they say that he would give you a five-shilling piece into your hand for two verses of an old song,’ said Thomas Hunter, an old man from Coomacoppal, in West Kerry, forgetting that five-shilling pieces were no longer in fashion. ‘Or for a story, if you have a good one.’

‘What sort of stories would them be?’ Michael Kivlehan asked sceptically. He was from the barony of Forth and Bargy, in County Wexford, and had been in the poorhouse for eleven years.

‘Any story at all only it is to be an old story and a good story. A story about the fairies, or about ghosts, or about the way people lived long ago.’

‘And what do he do with ‘um when he have ‘um?’

‘Hasn’t he a phonograph? And doesn’t he give them out over the wireless? And doesn’t everyone in Ireland be listening to them?’

‘I wonder now,’ said  Michael Kivlehan, ‘would he give me five shillings for the “Headless Horseman and the Coacha Bowr”?’

Thomas Hunter sighed.

‘One time I had a grand story about Finn MacCool and the Scotch giant. But it is gone from me. And I’d be getting my fine five-shilling piece into my fist this minute if I could only announce it to him.’

The two old men sat on the sides of their beds and tried to remember stories. But it was other things they remembered and they forgot all about the man outside who had set them thinking of their childhood.

The doctor had taken the collector into the women’s ward to meet Mary Creegan. She was sitting up in bed, alone in the long room; all the other women were out in the warm sun. As the two men walked up the bare floor the collector was trailing a long black cable from a microphone in his hand, and the doctor was telling him that she came from a place called Faill-a-ghleanna in West Cork.

‘She should have lots of stories because her husband was famous for them. After he died she went a bit airy so they had to bring her to us. ‘Twas a bit tough on her at first. Sixty years in the one cottage – and then to finish up here.’ They stood beside her bed. ‘I brought a visitor to see you, Mary,’ he said in a loud voice.

She did not appear to see them. She was humming happily to herself. Her bony fingers were wound about an ancient rosary beads. Her white hair floated up above a face as tiny and as wrinkled as a forgotten crab apple. All her teeth were gone so that her face was as broad as it was long: it was as if the midwife had pressed the baby’s chin and forehead betweeen thumb and forefinger. The doctor gently laid his hand under the tiny chin and turned her face towards him. She smiled.

‘Put down the kettle and wet the tay,’ she ordered.

The doctor sat on the bed; so did the collector.

‘‘Tis down, Mary and two eggs in the pot. This poor man here is after coming a long way to talk to you. He’s tired out.’

She turned and looked at the stranger. Encouraged by a brightening spark in the depths of her eyes he turned aside and murmured quietly into the microphone. ‘Reggy? Recording ten seconds from . . . now.’

‘It’s a bad road,’ she said. ‘Ask Jamesy is he keeping that divil of a cow out of the cabbage.’

‘She’s all right,’ the doctor cried into her ear. ‘Jamesy is watching her. Be talking to us while we’re waiting for the tay. You told me one time you saw a ghost. Is that true?’

She looked out of the window and her eyes opened and narrowed like a fish’s gills as if they were sucking something in from the blue sky outside. The collector stealthily approached her chin with the microphone.

‘Ghosts? Ayeh! Ha! My ould divil of a tailor is forever and always talkin’ about ‘um. But, sure, I wouldn’t heed him. Bummin’ and boashtin’ he is from morning to night and never a needle to be shtuck in the shtuff. Where is he? Why don’t you ask him to be talking to you about ghoshts?’

The doctor looked across the bed at the collector and raised his eyebrows.

‘Maybe you don’t believe in them yourself?’ he mocked.

‘I do not believe in ‘um. But they’re there. Didn’t I hear tell of ‘um from them that saw ‘um? Aye, and often. And often! Aye’ – still collecting her thoughts from the sky above the bakehouse chimney – ‘wasn’t it that way the night Father Regan died? Huh! They called him Father Regan, but he was not a right priest. He was silenced for some wrong thing he did when he was a young priest, and they sent him to Faill-a-ghleanna to be doing penance for it. When his time came to die it was a bad, shtormy night. And when he sent for the parish priest to hear his confession the priest said he could not come. And that was a hard thing to do, for no man should refuse the dying. And they sent another messenger for the priest, and still the priest could not come. “Oh,” said Father Regan, “I’m lost now.” So they sent a third messenger. And for the third time the priest could not come. And on his way back wasn’t the messenger shtopped on the road by a woman? It was Father Regan’s own mother. “Go back,” says she, “and if the candles by his bed light up,” says she, “of their own accord,” says she, “he is saved.” And the messenger went back, and Father Regan gave wan look at him and he closed his eyes for the last time. With that all the people went on their knees. And they began to pray. If they did, there were three candles at the head of the dead priest. And didn’t the one beside the window light up? And after a little while the candle beside the fire clevy lit up. And they went on praying. And the wind and the shtorm screaming about the house, and they watching the wick of the last candle. And, bit by bit, the way you’d blow up a fire with a bellows, didn’t the candle over the priest’s head light up until the whole room was like broad day light?’

The old woman’s voice suddenly became bright and hard.

‘Isn’t that tay ready a-yet? Domn and blosht it, ye’ll have them eggs like bullets.’ She looked alertly at the two men. ‘Where am I? Where’s Jamesy? What are ye doing to me?’

The doctor held her wrist. Her eyes faded. She sank back heavily.

‘I thought,’ she wailed, ‘that it was how I saw a great brightness.’

The collector spoke one word into the microphone. The old woman had fainted. Overcome with regrets  he began to apologize, but the doctor waved his hand at him.

‘Excited. I’ll send up the sister to give her an injection. Sometimes she loves to talk about old times. It does her good.’

They went out of the empty ward, the cable trailing softly. They passed the male ward. Michael Kivlehan and Thomas Hunter were sitting on their beds. As the doctor led the way downstairs, he said, ‘When that generation goes it will be all over. Wait for me outside. There are a couple more. You might get bits and scraps from them.’

The engineer put his head out of the van and said, in the gloomy voice of all engineers, ‘That might come through all right.’

When the doctor came out again they sat with a middle-aged man from Wicklow, named Fenelon. He had been on the roads until arthritis crippled him. When he counted the years he spoke in Urdu. He had scraps of the tinkers’ language which is called Shelta. He said:

‘I often walked from Dublin to Puck, and that’s a hundred miles, without ever disturbing anything but a hare or a snipe. I’d make for Ross, and then cross to Callan, and by Shevenamon west to the Galtees.’

He did not see the microphone; he did not see his visitors; as the needle softly cut the disc he was seeing only the mountainy sheep that looked at him with slitted eyes, a thing as shaggy as themselves.

They moved on to an old woman, who sang a love song for them in a cracked voice. She said she had learned it in Chicago. She gave them a poem of twelve verses about a voyage to the South Seas. They were finishing a disc with a very old man from Carlow when the sister came out and hastily beckoned to the doctor. As they folded up the cable he came back. He said, with a slow shake of the head:

‘It’s old Mary. I must leave ye. But ye have the best of them. The rest is only the shaking of the bag.

When they had thanked him and were driving away, the collector said, eagerly :

‘Pull up when we’re out of town. I want to play back those discs.

They circled up and out of the town until its murmur was so faint that they could hear only the loudest cries of the playing children. There they played back the discs, and as they leaned towards the loud-speaker and the black record circled smoothly they could see sideways through the window, the smoke of the hollow town. The last voice was Mary Creegan’s.

‘and after a little while the candle beside the fire clevy lit up. And they went on praying. And the wind and the shtorm screaming about the house, and they watching the wick of the last candle. And, bit by bit, the way you’d blow up a fire with a bellows, didn’t the candle over the priest’s head light up until the whole room was like broad day light. . . .  Isn’t that tay ready a-yet? Domn and blosht it, ye’ll have them eggs like bullets. . . .  Where am I? Where’s Jamesy? What are ye doing to me? . . .  I thought that it was how I saw a great brightness.’

The listeners relaxed. Then from the record came a low, lonely cry. It was the fluting of a bittern over moorland. It fluted sadly once again, farther away, and for a third time, almost too faint to be heard. Many times the men played back those last few inches of disc. Every time they heard the bittern wailing over the mountains.

It was dusk. They laid the voices in a black box and drove away. Then they topped the hill, and the antennae of their headlamps began to probe the winding descent to the next valley.

Disgrace

Early in his career, Richard Burton was said by one critic to “carry around with him his own cathedral,” meaning that Burton’s resounding voice didn’t always require the best acoustics. He imposed limitless space on the most intimate theater. Great novels carry around with them their own universe, no matter the intimacy of the subject or range of chronology or geography. 

I found J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, published in 1999, somber but surprisingly moving and engaging. Perhaps because of my age, a decade older than David Lurie, the novel’s protagonist, but I felt the novel’s wider significance, as a kind of post-Apartheid personal reckoning, floated above the drama without bearing down on it too heavily or obviously. The journey David takes in the course of the story is one he brings on himself, but his gradual transformation, much more than merely a humbling, is all the more moving for not being so edifying. David changes in the course of the story, but there is nothing to reassure us that his life will be anything but an acceptance of loss. His experiences with Lucy, his daughter, effectively break David, so that by the end of the novel the only possible uplift was provided by Coetzee’s language.  

When we first meet David, he is an all-too-typical intellectual, someone for whom ideas and literary figures are at least as real as the living people he encounters in the practice of his profession. He teaches English Romantic poetry in Cape Town to what he considers a class of indifferent students. His contented life is disrupted when Soraya, the woman he turns to for sexual comfort, quits the profession and instead of simply asking for a replacement from her “agency” (at her suggestion) David decides quite egoistically to impress his urges on an attractive student named Melanie Isaacs. His actions bring about his professional fall from grace (his importunities are inopportune), forcing him to find a new direction in his life. 

As much as I knew about South Africa, while reading the novel my ignorance kept me slightly off-balance. Finding myself there, in relatively untouched Cape Town, among educated and prosperous South Africans (some former Germans, some English), it made me wonder if the English I was reading and hearing was being spoken in the South African accent that I’ve heard before in movies. A few, surprisingly few, Afrikaaner words are used in the text, but the protagonist is a university professor and scholar of English, and he uses his familiarity with classic literature both to protect him from what he considers the cultural decay around him and as a weapon in defense of his irresponsible cupidity. 

There is also, unavoidably, the subject of race. Coetzee occasionally fails to identify the race of some of the characters he introduces. For instance, he tells us that Soraya, Lurie’s regular call girl, is Muslim, that she is classified as “exotic” by her agency. We are left to assume that she is at least part African. But when the men appear in the climactic scene, Coetzee writes: “Three men are coming toward them on the path, or two men and a boy.” They are Africans, but Coetzee doesn’t tell us this directly. If nothing else, the film adapted from the novel, released in 2008, makes race a non-issue by making it manifestly clear – except there are a few surprises. Melanie Isaacs, whom I thought was white in the novel, is most definitely not in the film. 

In his overall positive review of the film Stanley Kauffmann wrote: “There is one element missing here from the film that would help. In the novel Lucy [David’s daughter] is a lesbian, whose partner is off somewhere for a while.” Kauffmann clearly missed some dialogue at the beginning of the film in which David tells Soraya: “I haven’t heard from my daughter.” “Still living with a woman?” “Yes. Still a lesbian.” And when David first arrives at Lucy’s house, he asks, “Where’s Helen?”” She’s in Johannesburg,” Lucy tells him. 

The narrator is third person, but it may as well be David since it tells us David’s thoughts but no one else’s. His is a supple, responsive intelligence: “At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful of solutions, but then ageing is not a graceful business.” And since David is the locus of the film, dispensing with the narrator is no special loss. 

John Malkovich is David. I thought he was rather affected and mannered in some of his film roles. Here, even with the expected accent (which is just another affectation), I’m afraid that I was expecting more – more than he was able to give to the role, perhaps. He doesn’t upset the rest of the film, which is fine; but I found his performance disappointing, if only because Stanley Kauffmann called it “consummate.” 

Three other actors in the film, however, are all new to me and all splendid. Jessica Haines is wonderfully alive and responsive as Lucy. What she endures in the film (a gang rape and eventual pregnancy) is hard for David to fully comprehend, but the pain in Haines’s eyes is unmistakable. Antoinette Engel is taller than I expected as Melanie (in the novel she is “small and thin”), but she communicates vulnerability in the presence of David – which was likely what drew him to her. Both Haines and Engel are South African. Fiona Press, who is Australian (the film is an Australian production), is expressively present as Bev. 

Having just finished reading the novel last month, I found myself anticipating every scene as they came along. The film doesn’t try to expand on anything, but in the predictable process of transcribing the novel to the screen, the Australian director Steve Jacobs failed to supply me with a reason for doing it. I know of a few film adaptations of great novels that were more than serviceable, that at least made the word into flesh and illuminated the world that the novel portrays. The script was the work of Anna Maria Monticelli, who is married to the director. She mentioned how “It’s such a beautiful book, a great book actually, and I didn’t want to bastardise it. I didn’t want to change it in any way that would reinterpret things. It has this biblical kind of proportion to it, and a language that’s quite formal. I wanted to capture that.” Without bastardizing Coetzee’s novel, the film is guilty of a certain obviousness. Some scenes come off better than others, but some only approximate the force of the action in the novel. For instance, when David assists Bev with euthanizing the dogs, putting their corpses into plastic bags, driving them to an incinerator, and one by one pushing them into the fire, Coetzee made the whole ordeal immeasurably more moving (and I’m no dog lover). When, in the film, David has to pull off the road because he is overcome with emotion, the scene felt perfunctory and unmoving. 

The interior drama of David’s writing of the chamber opera about Lord Byron’s last mistress is entirely omitted. Also omitted is what could almost be regarded as the novel’s climax, when Lucy tells David, 

’I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too.'

'I suspect it is too late for me. I'm just an old lag serving out my sentence. But you go ahead. You are well on the way.' 

A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

The film changes the order of the last scenes: instead of ending at the animal shelter, it ends in the gentler penultimate scene in which David parks his truck on the hill above Lucy’s farm and walks down to her. 

In Wallace Stevens’s poem “Arrival at the Waldorf,” he writes of the strangeness of returning to a familiar world “After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” In many ways, I was grateful to see the people and places to which the novel introduced me in their unarguable actuality in the film. The only element of David’s story that Coetzee couldn’t give us, that alien, point-blank, green and actual South Africa, is undeniably present in the film.

Not Now, Darling

In Evelyn Waugh's second novel, Vile Bodies (1930), there is the scene in chapter V that differentiates Waugh for all time from P. G. Wodehouse - namely, a sex scene: 

There was a clock chiming as they crossed the yard and a slightly drunk farmer trying to start up his car. Then they went up an oak staircase lined with blunderbusses and coaching prints to their room. 

They had no luggage (the chambermaid remarked on this next day to the young man who worked at the wireless shop, saying that that was the worst of being in a main road hotel. You got all sorts). 

Adam undressed very quickly and got into bed; Nina more slowly arranging her clothes on the chair and fingering the ornaments on the chimney-piece with less than her usual self-possession. At last she put out the light. 

'Do you know,' she said, trembling slightly as she got into bed, 'this is the first time this has happened to me?' 

'It's great fun,' said Adam, 'I promise you.' 

'I'm sure it is,' said Nina seriously, 'I wasn't saying anything against it. I was only saying that it hadn't happened before. . . . Oh, Adam. . . .' 

* * * * 

'And you said that really divine things didn't happen,' said Adam in the middle of the night. 

'I don't think that this is at all divine,' said Nina. 'It's given me a pain. And - - my dear, that reminds me. I've something terribly important to say to you in the morning.' 

'What?' 

'Not now, darling. Let's go to sleep for a little, don't you think?' 

Before Nina was properly awake Adam dressed and went out into the rain to get a shave. He came back bringing two toothbrushes and a bright red celluloid comb. Nina sat up in bed and combed her hair. She put Adam's coat over her back. 

'My dear, you look exactly like La Vie Parisienne,' said Adam, turning round from brushing his teeth. Then she threw off the coat and jumped out of bed, and he told her that she looked like a fashion drawing without the clothes. Nina was rather pleased about that, but she said that it was cold and that she still had a pain, only not so bad as it was. Then she dressed and they went downstairs. 

Every one else had had breakfast and the waiters were laying the tables for luncheon. 

'By the way,' said Adam. 'You said there was something you wanted to say.' 

'Oh, yes, so there is. My dear, something quite awful.' 

'Do tell me.' 

'Well, it's about that cheque papa gave you. I'm afraid it won't help us as much as you thought.' 

'But, darling, it's a thousand pounds, isn't it?' 

'Just look at it, my sweet.' She took it out of her bag and handed it across the table. 

'I don't see anything wrong with it,' said Adam. 

'Not the signature?' 

'Why, good lord, the old idiot's signed it "Charlie Chaplin".' 

'That's what I mean, darling.' 

'But can't we get him to alter it? He must be dotty. I'll go down and see him again to-day.' 

'I shouldn't do that, dear . . . don't you see. . . . Of course, he's very old, and . . . I dare say you may have made things sound a little odd . . . don't you think, dear, he must have thought you a little dotty? . . . I mean . . . perhaps . . . that cheque was a kind of joke.' 

'Well I'm damned . . . this really is a bore. When everything seemed to be going so well, too. When did you notice the signature, Nina?' 

'As soon as you showed it to me, at Margot's. Only you looked so happy I didn't like to say anything. . . . You did look happy, you know, Adam, and so sweet. I think I really fell in love with you for the first time when I saw you dancing all alone in the hall.' 

'Well I'm damned,' said Adam again. 'The old devil.' 

'Anyway, you've had some fun out of it, haven't you. . . or haven't you?' 

'Haven't you?' 

'My dear, I never hated anything so much in my life. . . still, as long as you enjoyed it that's something.' 

'I say, Nina,' said Adam after some time, 'we shan't be able to get married after all.' 

'No, I'm afraid not.' 

'It is a bore, isn't it?' Later he said, 'I expect that parson thought I was dotty too.' And later, 'As a matter of fact, it's rather a good joke, don't you think?' 

'I think it's divine.' 

In the train Nina said: 'It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.'