GREAT ADAPTATIONS 

Three novelists nominate their favorite books turned films 

DEEPTI KAPOOR on Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo)

Many great films exploit and transcend the material of a bad book, but I can think of only one that so completely mines and elevates the political and aesthetic vision inherent within a literary work that it becomes a masterpiece all its own.

Director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 drama Memorias del subdesarrollo, adapted from Edmundo Desnoes’s post-revolution novel of the same name, takes us into the heart of Cuba in the weeks and months leading to the 1962 missile crisis. But don’t expect the narrative tension of a ticking clock. Desnoes’s protagonist, perhaps antagonist, Sergio, is a nowhere man, a bourgeois landlord and “aspiring” writer, wandering Havana alone since his wife and family have fled to the U.S. He has the looks and manner of a playboy. He doesn’t want to leave Havana but isn’t sure he should stay. He knows he’s out of time, a relic of imperialism, but he can’t believe in the revolution. So he muses, pontificates, judges, looks down from on high. The novel locks us into his perspective, we are trapped within his “I,” and though he is not quite a villain, we come to understand he is not our hero. How much we identify with him ultimately comes down to which side of the revolutionary struggle we fall on, but it is unmistakably a work with ironic intent. 

“What takes Memorias over the edge is the disruption of narrative through the gradual introduction of reality.”

Enter Alea. He’d already had a lengthy career in Cuban cinema before he brought Desnoes’s novel to the screen. Working within the ICAIC (the nationalized institute of film, commonly known for producing patriotic propaganda), he takes up the narrow, singular perspective of Sergio and explodes it with all the magic, technique and virtue of cinema, producing a daring, thrilling, expansive film that rattles the revolutionary cage from the privileged position within. 

Alea shoots Sergio as if he’s a European art-house antihero. One thinks of Godard, Antonioni, Resnais. One marvels at the formal audacity, the juxtaposition of sound and image, the wild and incisive editing, the freeze-frames, the flights of sexual fantasy, the cuts that create temporal disorder. Several scenes (Sergio in his bedroom, remembering his wife; Sergio stalking women in the street; Sergio at the pool) are simply breathtaking in their execution. 

And yet there is a point. A clear political point. Alea is using all the techniques of Western cinema to lure us in. We are invited to identify with Sergio only so far as to expose his emptiness. In one extraordinary shot, we zoom in on him from a distance as he crosses a highway. What first seems voyeuristic (or perhaps the view through a rifle scope) begins to disintegrate as he continues toward the camera. Sergio ceases to exist. He is nothing.

If the film remained as this, it would still be outstanding. But what takes Memorias over the edge is the disruption of narrative through the gradual introduction of reality. As Sergio collapses, we are exposed to the real world outside his perspective through newsreel and documentary footage. We see the revolution beyond his pampered, spoiled gaze. What may be alienating for Western audiences was likely a vindication of a revolutionary mindset for contemporary Cubans. You have seen inside the enemy and found him wanting. What’s truly remarkable, though, is how both perspectives legitimately coexist inside the run of the film. Fidel Castro said: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside of it, nothing.” Alea’s masterpiece manages to be both. 

Deepti Kapoor is the author of A Bad Character (2015) and Age of Vice (2023)

TEDDY WAYNE on The Talented Mr. Ripley

The first paragraph of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955):

“Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him. Tom had noticed him five minutes ago, eyeing him carefully from a table, as if he weren’t quite sure, but almost. He had looked sure enough for Tom to down his drink in a hurry, pay and get out.”

Tom Ripley is a two-bit con man, a forger of checks, accustomed to looking over his shoulder in dive bars with unceasing paranoia and wondering, “Was this the kind of man they would send after him?” His criminal’s conviction that he will be apprehended—for something—is bookended by the novel’s final page: “Was he going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier that he ever approached?”

In director Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation, we begin as Matt Damon’s earnest, bespectacled Tom plays classical piano for a black-tie gathering on a Central Park West rooftop. No over-the-shoulder paranoia or lengthy history of con-artistry in the film version of Tom Ripley, just soulfulness turning inward. His plucky underdog status is cemented as he dashes off for another gig as a restroom attendant. When Dickie Greenleaf’s father offers to pay Tom to persuade his ne’er-do-well son to return from Italy, he’s even about to turn him down—but the shipbuilding magnate, used to getting his way, hears yes and sends him packing.

“Highsmith’s descriptions can’t hope to compete with the superficial allure of Damon, Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in their primes, nor can her bare-bones prose make mid-century Italy as glamorous as the film’s lush set design.”

Highsmith’s Ripley is a sociopath of the highest order, a walking metaphor for amoral capitalist America preying on vulnerable postwar Europe. The coolly dispassionate third-person point of view situates the reader inside his scheming, cold-blooded mind. Film, of course, has no such interior access, and Minghella goes a step further in walling off his protagonist: Tom is the victim of a trauma that he won’t reveal to anyone. “Don’t you just take the past and put it in a room, in the basement, and lock the door and never go in there?” he asks his male lover as he plays piano, nonverbal music once again his only means of genuine expression. “And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key and say, ‘Open up, step inside.’ But you can’t. Because it’s dark, and there are demons. And if anybody saw how ugly it is…”      

Minghella never tosses us the key, but he does give us bountiful compensatory close-ups of Damon to put the audience in emotional lockstep with Tom: deep, roiling oceans of sentiment at the symphony and opera; barely closeted yearning as he stares at Jude Law’s golden-god figure; hot shame when Dickie and scene-stealing über-snob Freddie Miles (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) snicker at his “bourgeois” clothes and deportment.

As for those clothes: Highsmith’s descriptions can’t hope to compete with the superficial allure of Damon, Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in their primes, nor can her bare-bones prose make mid-century Italy as glamorous as the film’s lush set design. Regarding a mediocre night out in Rome: “Tom got very little out of the music-hall show, but he tried his very best. Dickie proposed leaving before the show was over.” In the film, Tom joins Dickie, the amateur saxophonist (a detail added by Minghella), onstage at a jazz club for a rousing rendition of “Tu vuò fà l’Americano.” You can’t help but want to be there with them in that room, in that era.      

But it’s a quieter sequence that has always stayed with me. Spurned by Dickie, who prefers to party with Freddie in Rome, Tom goes off to sightsee. He first passes two men on the street whose canoodling doesn’t draw much attention. Tom glances at them and quickly looks away. Then he visits the Roman Forum (barely mentioned in the novel), tourist guidebook in hand, at sunset. It should be a moment to share with Dickie, but he’s on his own, shunned in every way.

He’s no scheming sociopath here, just a lonely, tortured soul who can’t bring himself to unlock his own basement and, unable to live like those two publicly affectionate Italian men, finds the only outlet for his desires and self-loathing in murder. By the end, he’s not anticipating policemen waiting for him on every pier. The only man coming after him is himself.

Teddy Wayne is the author of Loner (2016) and The Winner (2024)

LUCY FOLEY on Bonjour Tristesse

I hear there’s a second adaptation in the works of Françoise Sagan’s classic novel Bonjour Tristesse, fronted by the dream cast of Claes Bang, Chloë Sevigny and Lily McInerny. I wonder if it will be a more faithful rendering than the first. The thing is, Otto Preminger’s 1958 adaptation—led by the glorious Jean Seberg in full silver-screen kitten mode and a charming, rakish David Niven—is one of my favorite films of all time. It’s just that it is completely different in feel and tone to a book that also happens to be one of my favorite novels of all time. 

Partly this discrepancy is because the book is so French: Cécile is sullen, indolent and spiky in a way that the cherubic, peppy Seberg could never sell. Moreover, on the page, Cécile’s beloved, irresponsible papa is a specifically Gallic breed of roué, while Niven is the subtly but crucially different English equivalent: the affable rogue, all RP [Received Pronunciation] and crumpled linen shirt. The difference between these two types of men could be summed up by shoes: The English rogue on the Riviera would go for decrepit leather deck shoes; the roué, espadrilles (Niven wears short shorts in the film but unconvincingly, like an Englishman trying out Euro style on holiday). And then finally—perhaps most importantly—we have the glamorous interloper into this father-daughter summer idyll, Anne, who in the book is perhaps the most specifically French creature of them all: her chic, her froideur, her carefully curated appetites, her sensuality. In this respect, the excellent yet so primly British Deborah Kerr could not be more wrong for a part that should by rights be played by Anouk Aimée or Françoise Fabian. And yet she’s great. Of course she is: She’s Deborah Kerr. She’s just not at all the character from the book. 

“The excellent yet so primly British Deborah Kerr could not be more wrong for a part that should by rights be played by Anouk Aimée or Françoise Fabian. And yet she’s great.”

The point is, the film works extremely well on its own merits. It’s gorgeous to look at, its leads are enormously charismatic. All the vibrancy of the Juan-les-Pins setting is brought to life in glorious Technicolor. The film’s palette—specifically the interplay of reds and blues—is cleverly used to underscore the characters’ personalities and emotional states. Also to love is the fact that it played an important part in cinematic history: Godard and Truffaut were apparently ardent fans and it led directly to Jean Seberg’s being cast in her most iconic role, Patricia in Breathless. In all, the atmosphere is a far sunnier, cheerier place than the book—which is really imbued with an element of tristesse from the get-go. The movie has a definite whiff of Brits abroad: larking about, going a bit louche and randy in the unfamiliarly hot sun. I respect that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to hew too closely to the inimitable atmosphere of the book, all teenage ennui and yearning. That yearning is the thing, incidentally, that makes the book for me, that transports me so fully and intimately into Cécile’s adolescent experience. On the page it all feels so urgent and raw, a deeply felt experience that could only ever have been written by an 18-year-old…but I suspect onscreen a faithful rendering could veer into melodrama, could feel a little silly—because teenagers, well, are a little bit silly. 

I think this is what too many literary adaptations aren’t confident enough to do. We talk a great deal about the faithfulness of an adaptation but trying too hard to be faithful to the printed word must almost necessarily result in the film falling short. One singular visual interpretation can never hope to replicate any of that. It has to do something different to succeed. 

So here I am: an author making the perhaps controversial case for literary adaptations that create something new, that stand apart from the source material, that claim their own raison d’être. Otherwise you might as well just read the book. 

Lucy Foley is the author of The Hunting Party (2019), The Guest List (2020) and The Paris Apartment (2022)