Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin” (1867) will provide the basis for a Brian De Palma film starring Emily Mortimer. Screen Daily reported last week that it will be produced by Said Ben Said of SBS Productions.
It will be a “loose adaptation… featuring both period and contemporary elements,” according to Screen’s Geoffrey Macnab, who added: “The story is about a film director and two actors shooting a movie version of Zola’s novel and finding that it reflects experiences in their own lives.”
In February, Said remarked to the French movie site CinéObs, “This is a film about cinema that is not devoid of humor or cruelty. It happens on a shoot between a director, an actor and an actress. De Palma wrote it by drawing on things that have happened to him. It is a kind of film testament.”
Zola’s fourth novel was intended as a scientific study of the “temperaments not the characters” of his protagonist and those who swirl around her: Thérèse, her lover Laurent, and her sickly husband Camille, whom the adulterous couple decide to kill, as well as Camille’s controlling mother.
The book is also the source of Charlie Stratton’s “Therese,” starring Elizabeth Olsen, Tom Felton, Jessica Lange, and Oscar Isaac, which just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s apparently a conventional version featuring sex scenes more graphic than any written by Zola. The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer described is a glum “proto-noir” that “grows increasingly Gothic.”
The “proto-noir” ascription derives from “Thérèse Raquin”’s probable influence on James M. Cain’s novels “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934) and “Double Indemnity” (1943), both about an adulterous couple that murders the woman’s husband. Although directly inspired by the 1927 Ruth Snyder case, both Cain novels echo Zola’s brutish naturalism and his feeling for sordidness. Among other movie versions, they were adapted into seminal films of the classic noir era: Billy Wilder’s 1944 “Double Indemnity” and Tay Garnett’s 1946 “Postman.”
What De Palma has in mind is impossible to say, though self-reflexivity is clearly going to be a central element: a beguiling prospect if the on-screen director proves to be the Mortimer character’s murderee. The announcement of the project sparked a flurry of speculations that it was going to be a “meta-adaptation.”
It sounds like it will be metafictional, in the same way as were the Charlie Kaufman-scripted “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Technically, De Palma’s may not be a bona fide “meta-movie.”
Since the director and the actors working on the “Thérèse Raquin” film will recognize that it echoes aspects if their lives, then they are making a metafictional-movie. This was the vague experience of the film actors played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and the director and stars of the film “On High in Blue Tomorrows,” in David Lynch’s “Inland Empire.”
To be a true meta-movie, however, the actress played by Mortimer and her director and co-star would have to communicate that De Palma’s movie (as opposed to their “Thérèse Raquin” project) is itself a fiction. Director Michael Winterbottom and star Steve Coogan, the meta-actor of our time, pulled this off with “A Cock and Bull Story,” based on Laurence Sterne’s metafictional novel “The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy” (1759-67).
SBS Productions is also readying “The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes,” a comedy biopic of the producer-director Roger Corman, to be directed by Joe Dante, and David Mamet’s Hitchcockian thriller “Blackbird,” starring Cate Blanchett. Said also produced David Cronenberg’s “Maps to the Stars,” now in post-production. The cast includes Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Carrie Fisher, and Olivia Williams.
