The Film of the Book

It's always scary to find that a book you love has been turned into a film. Scary because when you read a book, you make your own head film of it, and the (reel-life!) film of the book can come between you and your personal set of images. The images of the cinema are much more pervasive ... and will be identical for everyone who sees the film.

Polanski's Tess (1979) upset me. Not because it was a bad film, but I loved Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbavilles with a passion and his heroine looked nothing like mine, and his landscape (he shot in France) did not evoke the lush greenery and golden light and pre-raphaelite hues of my head-film.

I have not been able to watch the film version of Captain Corelli's Mandolin because I have such an emotional attachment to the book and Nicholas Cage just is NOT Corelli.

I was also not able to watch the film made of another favourite book, Graham Swift's Waterland , principally because, and this I fail to understand at all, the setting was shifted from the East Anglian fens to the US! A simular trans-Atlantic transposition meant that I had no interest at all in watching the film of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. Are film makers afraid that American audiences won't be able to relate to films set in Britain?

In fairness, though, there are sometimes films which chime exactly with your own vision of the book. Of Love and Shadows , the film of Isabel Allende's novel, was such a one, for me.

And Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was another.

And there is that real rarity - the film of a book you love which manages to be better than the novel. The only example I can think of is The English Patient. How could Ondaatje not have made more of his intensly romantic main plot? (Though Mingella should have brought Hana and Kip into the film rather more.)

All of this is by way of preamble. The Visitor dropped by yesterday to leave a comment telling me that Ang Lee's film of Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain won the top prize at the Venice film festival.

I've written before about how I love the book, so my heart's in my mouth - can the film measure up? I've watched the trailer and I like what I see ... very much. So I'm hopeful.

Now please do tell me about your experiences with the film of your favourite books ...