Michelle Williams, reports Variety, is likely to be cast as the Parisian pianist Lucile Angellier in the long-gestating film of the first and second instalments of Irène Némirovsky’s planned series of five novellas about life in Nazi-occupied France.
The movie, which will be called “Suite Française,” the name of the series, will be made by Saul Dibb, the British director of “The Duchess.” Production is expected to start in the spring.
A Ukrainian who lived in Paris and had attended the Sorbonne, Némirovsky had completed the first two novellas when she was arrested as a “stateless person of Jewish descent” by French police in July 1942 and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She died there of typhus after a month at the age of 39. Her banker husband Michael Epstein, along with his two brothers, and their sister were gassed at Auschwitz, but his and Némirovsky’s daughters Denise (born 1929) and Élisabeth (born 1937) survived the war in safe houses, Denise carrying with her her mother’s leatherbound notebooks containing her last writings.
The manuscript of the two novellas was kept by Denise Epstein, for 12 years before she opened it in 1954; she didn’t read it until the seventies and it wasn’t fully scrutinized until 1998. The first novella was typed, the second written in a minute hand because of the scarcity of paper. They were published jointly in France in 2004 and the book became an instant bestseller. It has since sold 2.5 copies worldwide. A work of major literary merit, it is praised for the reflectiveness Némirovsky brought to it at a time of fear and upheaval. She recorded in her notes that the rest of the series was “in limbo, and what limbo! It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends what happens.”
Descriptions of the film indicate that it will probably be based primarily on the second novella, “Dolce” (the Italian musical term for “sweet”), which presents the Occupation as a weirdly serene time while exploring the gulfs and affinities between the local populace and the occupiers.
Lucile, whose unfaithful husband is a prisoner of war, is an evacuee living in the best house in the rural town of Bussy with her dominating mother-in-law (presumably based on Némirovsky’s mother, with whom she had a tempestuous relationship). When the German commander Bruno von Falk, a former composer, is billeted there, he and Lucile bond over their love of music and she falls in love with him.
Their relationship becomes strained when Lucile gives refuge to an escaped POW who has shot the German interpreter billeted on his fiancée. The novella ends in July 1941 with Bruno’s imminent departure for the Eastern Front.
“For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read,” Denise Epstein said in a BBC interview in 2006. “It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory.”
Two of Némirovsky’s early stories were filmed. Julien Duvivier directed her 1929 “David Golder,” about a banker who can’t please his daughter, in 1930. Wilhelm Thiele’s 1931 musical comedy drama “Le Bal,” starring 13-year-old Danielle Darrieux as a daughter who takes revenge on her mother for not letting her go to a ball, was adapted from a 1930 novella. Thiele’s German-language version starred Dolly Haas and Lucie Mannheim, who would go on to play the doomed spy Miss Smith in Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” (1935).